Every nuclear weapons program for decades has relied extensively on illicit imports of nuclear-related technologies. This book offers the most detailed public account of how states procure what they need to build nuclear weapons, what is currently being done to stop them, and how global efforts to prevent such trade could be strengthened. While illicit nuclear trade can never be stopped completely, effective steps to block illicit purchases of nuclear technology have sometimes succeeded in slowing nuclear weapons programs and increasing their costs, giving diplomacy more chance to work. Hence, this book argues, preventing illicit transfers wherever possible is a key element of an effective global non-proliferation strategy.

The abstracts in this booklet summarise the research presented at an academic symposium convened on the sidelines of the 2015 NPT Review Conference. As we write this, journalists and seasoned experts in the nuclear policy field have been speculating about the particularly difficult challenges facing the Review Conference this year. To address those challenges, we would urge all concerned to consider the ideas and analyses presented at this symposium. Experts would be hard-pressed to find a better collection of fresh ideas and approaches for assessing and strengthening the NPT.

This volume provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of theoretical perspectives regarding the sources of and propensity for nuclear proliferation. The authors probe the broader questions of why states pursue or abstain from nuclear weapons, as well as finer methodological issues involving concept definition and development, hypothesis testing, and generalization of findings.

Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionmaker rationality and the revolutionary nature of the decision. Where one author emphasizes the importance of the individual leader’s national identity conception in determining a state’s nuclear path, the other explains nuclear decisions primarily with regard to the political-economic orientation of the ruling coalition. Notwithstanding a tendency to overinterpret evidence, the books represent the best of contemporary social science research and provide compelling interpretations of nuclear proliferation dynamics of great relevance to scholars and policymakers alike.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union prompted international concern over the safety and security of the Soviet arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In legislation sponsored by Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, the U. S. Congress approved a program to assist Soviet weapons dismantlement. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program has since authorized more than $1.5 billion for a wide array of weapons destruction, demilitarization, nuclear security, and nonproliferation activities in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union.