In our first article, Austin R. Cooper plumbs the archives for a piece that undermines some elements of the prevailing narrative of the history of French nuclear weapons. As he writes, the French government planned to conduct nuclear tests in an abandoned mine, the Argentella Massif, in Corsica, but it then abandoned those plans in 1960 in a matter of months in the face of local opposition. Cooper’s article argues that the controversy, resulting in the government’s about-face, raises questions about the accepted narrative of a firm consensus among French officials on the country’s nuclear-weapons policy. But he makes clear that this story, when placed in context, is not as straightforward as it may initially seem: “Democratic resistance trumped, in the narrowest framing of this case, French nuclear ambitions,” he writes, explaining that the victory was narrow because “Corsicans did not forge new solidarities with the Algerian and Polynesian communities who similarly faced French nuclear-testing projects during the 1960s but who would be unable to achieve the same success as the Argentella protesters in blocking these projects.”
Matt Bowen, Nicholas L. Miller, and Richard Nephew also look at nuclear testing, but with an eye to preventing future test explosions. They focus on the role of economic sanctions in deterring nuclear testing. Noting that the record to date has been “mixed” in this area, the authors identify avenues for increasing the effectiveness of unilateral and multilateral sanctions.
Shifting to biological weapons, our next article explores ways to overcome long-standing obstacles to effective implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention. Matthew P. Shearer, Christina Potter, Rachel A. Vahey, Nancy D. Connell, and Gigi Kwik Gronvall emphasize the concept of “assurance”—a more expansive term than, for example, “verification” or “compliance.” The authors conducted three dozen interviews for the article, and they argue that “[t]he broader concept of assurance provides a new framework for debate on efforts to increase certainty regarding states parties’ adherence to their treaty obligations—whether through verification, compliance assessment, confidence building, or transparency—including those that could be implemented in the absence of a comprehensive, legally binding protocol or verification regime.”
As Ana Sánchez-Cobaleda notes, the international community does not have a single, universally agreed definition of “dual use,” although there are numerous national and international measures in place to control the flow of dual-use goods. She notes some key developments in the evolution of the term, including the adoption of the intentionality criterion in UN Security Council Resolution 1540 and subsequent documents. She argues that this development “solves certain problems” but also “creates new challenges.”
Espen Mathy’s article takes up the question of how norms operate in regional groups of states, applying it to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. He concludes that regional normative pressure affects state commitment, but only in certain cases.
Nonproliferation scholarship includes considerable discussion of the impact of business decisions and market forces on nonproliferation policy. Mahdi Khelfaoui turns the tables, in a way. His article focuses on the role of US nonproliferation policies in Canada’s decision to stop its production of the medical isotope molybdenum-99, a process that involved highly enriched uranium.
In our book-review section, Christopher Clary assesses Mansoor Ahmed’s Pakistan's Pathway to the Bomb: Ambitions, Politics, and Rivalries, James J. Wirtz reviews Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation, and Jamie Withorne writes about Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Finally, I’m pleased to welcome the multitalented Natasha Bajema as co-editor. Before she came to the Nonproliferation Review and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in the fall of 2023, Natasha worked at the Council on Strategic Risks, the National Defense University, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Department of Defense. She also has produced the YouTube travelogue show Radioactive Road Trippin’ and has written six works of fiction.