A sense of crisis led to the formation of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) nearly 10 years ago. “You have to remember that by 2005 the Bush administration had walked back from key arms control and nonproliferation commitments,” says Zia Mian of Princeton University. It had come out that Iran was building a uranium enrichment facility and a research reactor that could be used for plutonium production. North Korea also had pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and threatened to test nuclear weapons. “And we’d had 9/11,” says Mian. “There was a real need to make some kind of collective intervention to stop everything falling apart.”
Around the same time, Frank von Hippel, cofounder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, joked to a group of ambassadors at the United Nations that the problems of “nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation, and the prevention of nuclear terrorism are...
