ABSTRACT
The international non-proliferation community has been grappling with a number of challenges over the past few years. Recent research suggests that terrorist groups are becoming interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that state actors continue to remain interested in developing latent WMD capability (if not the weapons themselves), and that the black market in materials and technologies that can assist both types of actors in this quest continues to thrive. This situation persists even as we see a growth in the number of international agreements and initiatives to control the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons and missiles. Within these, the agreements to regulate trade and transfers of sensitive dual-use technologies have been under maximum strain. Globalization of liberal free market ideology, the diffusion of advanced technologies to an ever larger number of states, and the transnationalization of the high-tech industry have together created an environment where controls on export of sensitive technologies are hard to legislate upon, and even harder to implement and enforce at the national level. Reaching and sustaining export control agreements between nations has become correspondingly more difficult. Despite these trends, the four major multilateral export control regimes: the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Australia Group (AG) and the Wassenaar Arrangement (WA) have survived, and are engaged in efforts to re-equip themselves to face the changed environment (see Table 1.1). In order to assess whether, and to what extent, they will succeed in their mission, we must examine their origins, operations, successes and failures.
