Academic perspectives on the non-proliferation problem

The USA has demonstrated a greater penchant for a technical focus aimed at denial than any other state, despite a brief interlude under President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger when it displayed a total lack of concern about proliferation. This terminated with the sudden reawakening of interest following the Indian explosion and the announcement that the USA was not prepared to accept additional requests for uranium-enrichment services. According to Brenner, this enrichment crisis was engineered as a deliberate act of policy: yet this act of policy was unrelated to non-proliferation objectives. Rather, the Nixon administration's interest in privatisation in general, and commercialisation of enriched-uranium supply in particular, had led to a bureaucratic battle between the domestic side of the White House, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE). This battle was totally unrelated to foreign policy: a situation not without precedent in this area. Nixon's Republican administration deliberately provoked a supply bottleneck by changing the terms of AEC supply contracts, with the intention of forcing the Democrat-dominated JCAE to agree to the entry of private industry into the uranium-enrichment business. The outcome was more dramatic than had been intended