Fort McNair –
Book Review
Nathan E. Busch and Joseph F. Pilat in their book The Politics of Weapons Inspections: Assessing WMD Monitoring and Verification Regimes draw attention to the important role that politics can play within weapons of mass destruction (WMD) verification, but the title promises more than the authors deliver. The authors analyze three cases of disarmament using inspections (South Africa, Iraq, and Libya); examine how the verification of global nuclear disarmament might or might not work; and apply the book’s lessons to what they term difficult cases, which may be subject to future inspections (North Korea, Iran, and Syria). The studies provide a useful survey and side-by-side comparison of the successes, pitfalls, and likely future challenges of efforts to verify individual state compliance with WMD agreements. The authors on occasion fail to place the case studies within a broader geopolitical context, leaving important gaps in their analysis, which makes for an uneven read. As an example, the authors point to shortfalls in multilateral verification regimes without fully assessing how these regimes are limited and sometimes hamstrung by the external and internal politics of sovereign states. READ MORE>>>