The Nonproliferation Emperor Has No Clothes the Nonproliferation R
The Nonproliferation Emperor Has No Clothes The Nonproliferation R. Scott Kemp Emperor Has No Clothes The Gas Centrifuge, Supply-Side Controls, and the Future of Nuclear Proliferation What policies have most constrained the proliferation of nuclear weapons over the last sixty years? Will they continue to do so in the future? Scholars have long acknowledged that states may forgo nuclear weapons if their security concerns, domestic politics, and social norms do not favor ac- quisition.1 These political and cultural factors may be the primary determi- nants of proliferation, but they are not easily modulated by public policy. As such, policymakers have more often focused on impeding the path to nuclear weapons acquisition by controlling technology. This “supply-side” approach keeps with a long tradition. As far back as 1944, senior political ofªcials in the United States and the United Kingdom believed that, although the bomb itself was not particularly difªcult to fabricate, the effort needed to replicate the Manhattan Project’s enormous ªssile material production facilities would pro- vide an almost automatic barrier to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.2 More recently, scholars have represented proliferation rings, illicit trade, and nuclear smuggling as being critical vectors that enable proliferation among the technically weak.3 A.Q. Khan has become a pop icon for contemporary prolif- R. Scott Kemp is Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author is indebted to Valentin Borisevich, Christopher Chyba, Owen Coté, Trevor Edwards, Alexander Glaser, Olli Heinonen, Tsunetoshi Kai, Sultan Bashir Mahmood, Zia Mian, Masud Naraghi, Mahdi Obeidi, Joshua Pollack, Riazuddin, Lawrence Sparks, Frank von Hippel, Houston Wood, Shi Zeng, and several engineers and government ofªcials who have asked to remain anonymous.
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