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| 1 |
ID:
131112
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Technology has been long understood to play a central role in limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Evolving nuclear technology, increased access to information, and systematic improvements in design and manufacturing tools, however, should in time ease the proliferation challenge. Eventually, even developing countries could possess a sufficient technical ability. There is evidence that this transition has already occurred. The basic uranium-enrichment gas centrifuge, developed in the 1960s, has technical characteristics that are within reach of nearly all states, without foreign assistance or access to export-controllable materials. The history of centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective, as do previously secret studies carried out by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom. Complicating matters, centrifuges also have properties that make the detection of a clandestine program enormously difficult. If conditions for the clandestine and indigenous production of weapons have emerged, then nonproliferation institutions focused on technology will be inadequate. Although it would represent a near-foundational shift in nuclear security policy, the changed technology landscape may now necessitate a return to institutions focused instead on motivations.
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| 2 |
ID:
066987
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| 3 |
ID:
075784
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| Publication |
2006.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This research report explains why safeguards on uranium-ore mines are a theoretically interesting way of dealing with clandestine enrichment facilities, complementing several nonproliferation schemes. A description of mining operations explains how safeguarding mines could fulfill two nonproliferation objectives: ensuring the non-diversion of uranium from mines, and establishing a certified inventory of uranium for use in follow-on material accounting. However, this report also finds that it is essentially impossible to detect undeclared mining, and that this fatal flaw eliminates the ability of safeguards on mines to be useful in addressing the clandestine enrichment problem.
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| 4 |
ID:
156588
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| Summary/Abstract |
Some scholars have suggested that illicit state-to-state technology transfer and black-market activities are the primary vectors by which technically weak states acquire nuclear weapons. However, a more recent literature has questioned this view, arguing that natural technological change and public-domain information have been potentially more important enablers of proliferation. Articles supporting this perspective have examined gas centrifuge programs in emerging nuclear powers and failed proliferators. This article examines how viable centrifuge-engineering information first circulated and eventually entered the public domain. It then traces the adoption of this technology in nine latent proliferators: countries that are not known to have pursued nuclear weapons immediately, but which nonetheless became capable of making them. The histories of these programs reinforce the argument that public-domain information and basic technology are adequate for proliferation and cannot be reliably limited by technology controls or secrecy.
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| 5 |
ID:
057985
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| 6 |
ID:
107879
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