A look at experience in Iran and North Korea--and the origins of the NPT and safeguards in the 1960s--offers insights into the authority of IAEA nuclear inspectors.

On Oct. 9, 2006, North Korea conducted a nuclear test and proclaimed itself a world nuclear power. The explosion yield was less than one kiloton, much less than the first nuclear test of other states and even less than the expected yield of four kilotons that North Korean officials forecast to their Chinese counterparts.

Nonetheless, the test demonstrated Pyongyang's mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle and at least rudimentary nuclear-weapon design and manufacturing capabilities.

On Feb. 13, North Korea signed a six-party agreement to take initial actions to implement a Sept. 19, 2005 Joint Statement for the eventual abandonment of its nuclear weapons program. While this is welcome news, the road to the abandonment of North Korean nuclear weapons and capabilities will be long and arduous, and success is far from guaranteed. Its nuclear program still poses significant risks to international security, the most serious of which is the export of nuclear materials, expertise or technologies to states such as Iran and the potential for subsequent proliferation to terrorists.

Chapter 4 in Terrorism Financing and State Responses: A Comparative Perspective (Stanford 2007), edited by Harold Trinkunas and Jeanne K. Giraldo.

This chapter uses a rational choice approach to examine the political economy of terrorist financing. To date, much of the theoretical literature and almost all government-sponsored reports discuss terrorist organizations as though they are made up of ideologically driven purists who share a uniform commitment to the cause. This assumption is needed to explain how these organizations can both (1) efficiently distribute funds and (2) operate covertly without the checks and balances most organizations require. However, upon closer inspection, one often sees substantial differences in the preferences of key players in terrorist networks. Two selection processes explain why these differences exist, and a principal-agent framework shows how these differences lead to inefficiencies in terrorist financial systems. Terrorist organizations face a trade-offbetween enduring the inefficiency or employing corrective strategies that create vulnerabilities. Governments can undertake specific actions to make this trade-offmore problematic.

The book examines financial and material resources, correctly perceived as the life blood of terrorist operations. Governments have determined that fighting the financial infrastructure of terrorist organizations is the key to their defeat. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a good deal has been learned about sources and mechanisms used to finance the "new" terrorism, which is religiously motivated and exponentially more deadly than previous generations of terrorist organizations. New policies have been devised to combat the threat and existing policies have been enacted with greater vigor than ever before. Five years into the battle against terrorist financing, it is time to take stock of the emerging literature on terrorist financing, cut through a number of myths that have developed around the issue, and assess the current policy debates.

Through a series of thematic chapters and organizational and regional case studies--examining terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and regions such as East Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and South East Asia--the authors provide a comprehensive assessment of the state of our knowledge about the nature of terrorism financing, and the evolution and effectiveness of terrorist strategies and government responses. This volume focuses on the preferences of major actors within terrorist networks and government agencies and the domestic and international contexts in which they make decisions and execute their strategies. It argues that both terrorism financing and government responses face problems of coordination, oversight, and information asymmetries that render them vulnerable to disruption.

Does the proliferation of nuclear weapons cause ongoing conflicts to diminish or to intensify? The spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia offers an opportunity to investigate this crucial question. Optimistic scholars argue that by threatening to raise the cost of war astronomically, nuclear weapons make armed conflict in South Asia extremely unlikely. Pessimistic scholars maintain that nuclear weapons make the subcontinent war-prone, because of technological, political, and organizational problems. This book argues that nuclear weapons have destabilized the subcontinent, principally because of their interaction with India and Pakistan's territorial preferences and relative military capabilities. These findings challenge both optimistic and pessimistic conventional wisdom and have implications beyond South Asia.

This analysis questions President George W. Bush's reasons for refusing to follow a number of provisions of the U.S.-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act.

In his oral bill-signing statement to reporters and members of the public, President Bush praised the bill he was signing. He did not mention his disagreements with Congress on several of the provisions of the bill. However, in a separate written signing statement, he made clear that he, not Congress, conducts foreign policy and therefore has the greater say on what that policy should be. He declared: "Given the Constitution's commitment to the presidency of the authority to conduct the Nation's foreign affairs, the executive branch shall construe such policy statements as advisory." Thus, he concluded, he will not follow some of the provisions of the new statute: "My approval of the Act [by signing it] does not constitute my adoption of the statements of foreign policy in the Act as U.S. foreign policy."