CALLING FOR ACTION

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards are under more stress today than at any time in their history. Compliance concerns, a shortage of resources and technology, and growing responsibilities threaten to undermine the effectiveness and credibility of this vital and fundamental pillar of the nonproliferation regime. To address this challenge, the United States recently launched the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to ensure the IAEA makes the fullest possible use of its existing authority to prevent the diversion of safeguarded material and to investigate suspicious activities. The initiative will advance state-of-the-art technology, foster the development of a new generation of safeguards experts, and promote technology collaborations and safeguards-conscious infrastructure in states using or pursuing nuclear power. Although it has a domestic focus, the initiative's intent is to catalyze a much broader commitment to international safeguards in partnership with other governments and the IAEA.     

Varieties of Assurance

Strategies that seek to assure other states about their security have the potential to reduce international conflict and dissuade states from seeking nuclear weapons. Yet, relative to other tools of statecraft such as deterrence, assurance remains understudied. To facilitate further empirical research on assurance strategies, this article identifies variations in the terminology scholars and policymakers have used to refer to such strategies and describes the concept of assurance associated with each variant. It seeks to clarify and standardize usage and show that there is a general, overarching concept of assurance that links the different variants. It also summarizes existing bodies of empirical research that are relevant to assessing the utility of different forms of assurance.     

Book Reviews

The purpose of this article is to analyse British strategic nuclear targeting between 1974 and 1979, prior to the successful completion of the sophisticated modification to Polaris submarine-missile system codenamed Chevaline. It will use as its starting point the parameters for UK strategic nuclear targeting, and the foundation of the ‘Moscow Criterion’, prior to the deployment of Britain's Polaris submarines which began in 1968. It will then discuss the recommendation by the Chiefs of Staff to retarget Polaris in 1975/76 and the implications of that recommendation in terms of the British approach to strategic nuclear deterrence. The article will conclude with an assessment of these retargeting decisions on the decision to replace Polaris with the US Trident system in 1980.     

Resource allocation in an asymmetric technology race with temporary advantages

We consider two opponents that compete in developing asymmetric technologies where each party's technology is aimed at damaging (or neutralizing) the other's technology. The situation we consider is different than the classical problem of commercial R&D races in two ways: First, while in commercial R&D races the competitors compete over the control of market share, in our case the competition is about the effectiveness of technologies with respect to certain capabilities. Second, in contrast with the “winner‐takes‐all” assumption that characterizes much of the literature on this field in the commercial world, we assume that the party that wins the race gains a temporary advantage that expires when the other party develops a superior technology. We formulate a variety of models that apply to a one‐sided situation, where one of the two parties has to determine how much to invest in developing a technology to counter another technology employed by the other party. The decision problems are expressed as (convex) nonlinear optimization problems. We present an application that provides some operational insights regarding optimal resource allocation. We also consider a two‐sided situation and develop a Nash equilibrium solution that sets investment values, so that both parties have no incentive to change their investments. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 59: 128–145, 2012     

Beyond Pessimism: Why the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Will Not Collapse

This article questions the predominantly pessimistic assessments over the future of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). After analysing available evidence on states’ interests and interactions within the NPT’s framework, it argues that several negative expectations are unwarranted. Conversely, the article identifies three potentially threatening scenarios. Therefore, it scrutinizes the likely impact of reactive nuclear proliferation; analyses the probability of significant actors challenging the existent nuclear architecture; and explores whether the treaty’s enforcement might soon be diluted. The article concludes the NPT is unlikely to face fundamental threats in the foreseeable future.     

French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of this article is to evaluate how French Major Conventional Weapons (MCW) exports impact on the conflict intensity of recipient countries. The recent increase in French arms exports seems to contradict the French political discourse on the promotion of regional stability. We run zero-inflated ordered probit model in order to analyze the role of the arms trade on the intensity of civil conflicts in 144 countries from 1992 to 2014, using SIPRI and UCDP/PRIO data. Our results suggest that French MCW exports tended not to exacerbate intrastate conflicts during this period. This finding is robust to changes in the empirical framework. We propose two lines of explanations: France seems to be prone to choosing partners that respect human rights and selling more ‘defense-oriented’ MCW than the rest of the world.     

一种新的一体化压水型反应堆──热管输热核反应堆构想

本文提出了热管输热核动力反应堆的构想,即用热管代替现今压水堆的一回路管道、主泵和稳压器,并对热管输热反应堆进行了原理分析,提出了工程应用可行性等急需研究的问题。     

Russia,America and missile defense

Russia has sharply objected to US plans for ballistic missile defense. The Russian official explanation is that the real purpose of the US missile defense plan is to make it impossible for Russia to retaliate against a US nuclear (or massive conventional) attack, thus making Russia subject to military blackmail by the US. The Russian response has been the result of a sum total of various factors, mostly political and cultural, while the technical capabilities of the proposed system have played a secondary role.     

Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence,Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy

Secure second strike nuclear forces are frequently held to be easy to procure. Analysts have long argued that targeting intelligence against relocatable targets like submarine launched and land mobile ballistic missiles is difficult to obtain. However, the scholarly consensus on intelligence for counterforce operations is seriously overdrawn. Both during and after the Cold War, the United States developed substantial intelligence capabilities to track and target submarines and mobile missiles. These efforts achieved important and under-appreciated success. Second strike forces have been far more vulnerable than most analysts are willing to credit.     

A Reversal of Fortunes? Extended Deterrence and Assurance in Europe and East Asia1

ABSTRACT

The extended deterrence relationships between the United States and its allies in Europe and East Asia have been critical to regional and global security and stability, as well as to nonproliferation efforts, since the late 1950s. These relationships developed in different regional contexts, and reflect differing cultural, political and military realities in the US allies and their relations with the United States. Although extended deterrence and assurance relations have very different histories, and have to some extent been controversial through the years, there has been a rethinking of these relations in recent years. Many Europeans face a diminished threat situation as well as economic and political pressures on the maintenance of extended deterrence, and are looking at the East Asian relationships, which do not involve forward deployed forces as more attractive than NATO’s risk-and-burden-sharing concepts involving the US nuclear forces deployed in Europe. On the other hand, the East Asian allies are looking favorably at NATO nuclear consultations, and in the case of South Korea, renewed US nuclear deployments (which were ended in 1991), to meet increased security concerns posed by a nuclear North Korea and more assertive China. This paper explores the history of current relationships and the changes that have led the allies to view those of others as more suitable for meeting their current needs.