Argentina and the Bomb

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, by John Mueller. Oxford University Press, 2009. 336 pages, $27.95.

Les armes nucléaires: Mythes et réalités [Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Realities], by Georges Le Guelte. Actes Sud, 2009. 390 pages, [euro]25.     

Nuclear ‐ and missile‐related trade and developments for selected countries,November 1996‐February 1997

The material in this overview is drawn from selected abstracts that appear in the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ nuclear and missile databases. Transactions of nuclear and missile technologies, parts, and materials are listed according to the recipient country. Other developments are listed according to the country where the event or development took place. The new, streamlined format of this section indicates a decision by the Monitoring Proliferation Threats Project to focus on only key information in the overview and to offer more in‐depth analysis in the “Reports” section of the journal.     

A m‐parallel crane scheduling problem with a non‐crossing constraint

In this paper, we study a m‐parallel machine scheduling problem with a non‐crossing constraint motivated by crane scheduling in ports. We decompose the problem to allow time allocations to be determined once crane assignments are known and construct a backtracking search scheme that manipulates domain reduction and pruning strategies. Simple approximation heuristics are developed, one of which guarantees solutions to be at most two times the optimum. For large‐scale problems, a simulated annealing heuristic that uses random neighborhood generation is provided. Computational experiments are conducted to test the algorithms. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007.     

Does Spoiling Work? Assessing the Impact of Spoilers on Civil War Peace Agreements

Scholars and policymakers argue that violent actors – termed ‘spoilers’ – pose a significant threat to civil war peace agreements. Yet existing research, which is overly reliant on single-case studies, has not effectively determined how prevalent spoiling is, or thoroughly examined what its ultimate effects are on peace agreements. This article draws on a newly constructed cross-national dataset of spoiling following 241 civil war peace agreements in the post-Cold War era to analyze spoiling. It finds that spoiling intended to terminate an agreement is not as common as typically assumed, but still plagues a sizeable number of peace agreements. Moreover, most actors who resort to this strategy typically fail in their goals and the agreement is not at risk, despite the high publicity and attention given to these threats. Yet particular types of actors, most notably paramilitaries and state security forces excluded from the agreement, can pose a significant threat to peace.