ABSTRACT
"The future will be unlike the past," warns Donald Kerr. "But if the future is to offer the full benefits of the peaceful atom and to manage the threat of further proliferation, it will only be as the result of our vision and our resolve." Lewis Dunn, assistant director for nuclear and weapons control of ACDA, strikes the same note. According to Dunn, in the decades ahead the existing international non-proliferation regime will be challenged by the "probabilities and possibilities," or trends, that include:
Limited near-term demand for nuclear power;
Initiation or expansion of nuclear research programs in many developing countries;
The emergence of new nuclear technologies and exports of proliferation concern;
The rise of new nuclear suppliers;
The shift in some industrial countries to more advanced fuel cycle activities;
The continued existence of mixed safeguarded and unsafeguarded fuel cycles in several countries;
More countries approaching the threshold of a technical capability to develop nuclear explosives;
Intensified pressure on the NPT regime as the 1995 deadline for treaty renewal approaches;
Debilitating politicization of the International Atomic Energy Agency;
Temptation to blend civil and military nuclear programs; and
The occurrence of dramatic proliferation events.
