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In May, the Energy Department confirmed that it was selecting four applicants to proceed to the penultimate "due diligence" stage of the $18.5-billion federal loan-guarantee program for new nuclear power projects.

Public campaigns against nuclear weapons have been surprisingly effective over the years. Although public concern about nuclear weapons has existed ever since the Hiroshima bombing, it has been particularly salient thanks to three waves of anti-nuclear protest.

The U.S.-Russian summit held earlier this month in Moscow marked a good beginning for the relationship between the Obama and Medvedev administrations. While the two presidents made promising progress on the most urgent issue on the table--replacing START--it wasn't the only important agreement they made.

In any debate, there is a tendency to set up and knock down straw men. The emerging debate about whether the United States should work toward abolishing nuclear weapons is no different.

The October 2001 anthrax event attracted considerable attention to the safety and security of microbiology research and diagnostic programs, particularly those operating at high-containment laboratories. This scrutiny, although not undue, has resulted in a great deal of caution--and subsequently, delays--within U.S. government departments and agencies responsible for conducting research on infectious disease.

In December 1995, on a chilly winter's day in Oslo, John Holdren delivered an eloquent Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. For the first time in its 95-year history, the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded jointly to an organization, Pugwash, and to an individual, Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash's co-founder and then-president.

Recently, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) projected that the global output of nuclear power will expand anywhere from 473 to 748 gigawatts by 2030. This expansion primarily will take place in countries with existing nuclear programs, but an additional 20 countries with no history of nuclear power are actively considering building reactors as well.

Russia has decades of experience in dealing with North Korea on nuclear nonproliferation matters. The former Soviet Union first tried to coax Pyongyang into joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) back in the 1960s. Later, in the early 1970s, Soviet diplomats flew to North Korea to explain the virtues of NPT membership. They recall that the delegation was received with great fanfare and the hosts listened politely enough, but Pyongyang remained unresponsive.