Editor's Note

Miles A. Pomper

Talk to Egypt's outgoing ambassador to the United States, Nabil Fahmy, and you will quickly realize how adamant he is that the Middle East will see no end to nuclear crises until states agree to establish a zone free of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Fahmy's stance, spelled out in an interview excerpted in this month's magazine, reflects a geopolitical reality: Egypt's peace treaty partner and neighbor Israel is widely believed to have nuclear arms, Iraq and Libya sought to acquire them in the past, and an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor and Iran's uranium-enrichment program have generated concerns that they are on the same course. These developments have raised security concerns in Egypt, a non-nuclear-weapon state-party to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

Egypt also has been among the leading countries insisting that they will not waive their NPT rights to trade in peaceful nuclear technology, including sensitive technologies such as uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing that can provide fissile material for weapons as well as fuel for nuclear reactors. Facing such opposition, states, nuclear operators, and independent groups have suggested roughly a dozen ways that states might be induced to rely on the international market rather than acquire such facilities themselves. Fiona Simpson lays out the current status of those options and their likely prospects in one of our feature articles.

In another, Frank N. von Hippel argues for a different way of chipping away at this problem by addressing Iran's contention that it needs to build its own enrichment facilities to guarantee a supply of nuclear fuel. He says that the international community should seek to meet this demand for energy security by providing Iran with a sufficient stockpile of low-enriched uranium. In return, he contends, Iran should provide greater transparency.

In our news section this month, Peter Crail discusses recent developments in Iran's nuclear and missile programs, Wade Boese looks at how the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia will affect the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, and Oliver Meier notes how a recently declassified Pentagon report is contributing to ongoing questions about the future of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

One of the wonders of the nuclear age is that no nuclear weapons have been used in war since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than six decades ago. In our book review section this month, William Burr examines The Nuclear Taboo, a new work by Nina Tannenwald, which chronicles the evolution of a norm against the use of such arms.