Deepti Choubey: A Chance for Nuclear Leadership

Deepti Choubey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace penned a great piece yesterday on the need for U.S. leadership in global nonproliferation efforts.

Whoever wins in 2008, the most important strategic foreign policy issue facing the next President and Congress will be how to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons. For almost four decades the world has been protected by a global agreement -- the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) -- which worked to keep the number of nuclear weapon states small. That agreement, and the world order that relies on it, badly needs U.S. leadership.

There are three reasons why American influence is needed. First, the nuclear "have-not" states, who signed away their right to develop nuclear weapons, don't believe that the "haves" are living up to their side of the deal to eventually dismantle their weapons.

Second, Iran's continuing refusal to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) obligations and legally binding UN Security Council resolutions undermines the effectiveness of a rule-based system for managing nuclear technology and threatens international peace and security.

And third, as excitement over a nuclear energy renaissance grows, non-nuclear-weapon states in the developing world declare large ambitions to master the nuclear fuel cycle, a scenario the old rules didn't account for.

But the regime can be saved.

How, you eagerly ask? Well, you’ll have to read on.