This book was written while I was in my eighth year as director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. While at Carnegie I had the opportunity to directly engage some of the top scholars and senior officials in the field, both in the United States and around the world. Their insights inform the discussion of the history, theory, and future of nuclear weapons within this volume. I have tried to cite as many of them as possible and refer the reader to their works for more in-depth discussion. To all, named and unnamed, I owe a debt of gratitude.
During the two years of writing for this book, I relied heavily on the dedication and assistance of Jane Vaynman and Joshua Williams, two of the finest researchers at Carnegie. Both worked for months to provide historical data, reviews of literature on the history and theory of proliferation, first drafts, informed comments, and painstaking corrections. Ben Bain and Caterina Dutto also pored over volumes of writings on nuclear issues and diligently delivered references, tables, charts, and insights. Georgetown University graduate student Courtney Radsch and Carnegie researcher Revati Prasad got this book off to a strong start with research that informed the proliferation theory chapter. My colleagues and my coauthors of Deadly Arsenals, Jon B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, educated and sustained me not only during the drafting of this study but throughout our years together at the Endowment. The book could not have been written without this outstanding Carnegie nonproliferation team.
As always, the Carnegie library staff of Kathleen Higgs and Chris Henley cheerfully and quickly provided vital research materials. Carnegie president Jessica Mathews and vice president George Perkovich, whose leadership has made the Endowment one of the premier global research institutions, graciously tolerated my obsession with this book and the time it took away from other vital projects.
I would also like to thank Mark Strauss, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for allowing me to develop this historic analysis as an article, “Lessons Lost,” in the November 2005 issue of his essential magazine, and Jon Lottman of Dot-Org Digital for producing a spectacular video presentation based on my lecture, “A Brief History of the Atomic Age,” posting it on the web, and packaging it in a beautiful DVD. This presents a video overview of the first two chapters of this book. Thank you also to John Podesta, for bringing me on as senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, and to the team there that supported my lecture tour on this book. After two years at the center, I am grateful to the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund for appointing me as its new president and to the foundation’s executive director, Naila Bolus, for her unselfish partnership as I take on this new mission.
I am grateful for the generous past support of the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Prospect Hill Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Ploughshares Fund, the Newland Foundation, and the George Family Foundation. Thanks also to the editors of Columbia University Press for inviting me to write this study, for patiently awaiting its delivery, for greatly improving what they received, and updating the book for the paperback edition.
My wife, Priscilla Labovitz, and my two wonderful, accomplished children, Amy and Peter Cirincione, have given me the most supportive and loving family a man could want. They are in great part responsible for the optimism the reader will find in the final chapters.
Joseph Cirincione
Washington, D.C.
March 2008