Nuclear Proliferation and Accidents

This briefing book contains material from the National Security Archive's project on U.S. policy toward South Asia, which is documenting nuclear developments in India and Pakistan from the 1950s to the present. The Archive is collecting U.S. government records that illustrate American policies and perspectives. Information is being collected from the National Archives and the presidential libraries, and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Mandatory Review requests, used to obtain the declassification of now- secret materials. A selective and focused collection of documents will be made available to researchers.

Washington, D.C. -- May 12, 1998 --In the wake of India's first nuclear weapons tests in 24 years, the National Security Archive has published 22 declassified U.S. government analyses of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear program on the World Wide Web. These documents illustrate issues and concerns that guided policy during a critical period in South Asia's nuclear history: as the U.S. assessed the liklihood that India would opt for nuclear weapons, tried to devise means of dissuading it from doing so, and gauged the response of neighboring Pakistan.

Washington, D.C. – The National Security Archive has initiated a special project on the Chinese nuclear weapons program and U.S. policy toward it. The purpose is to discover how the U.S. government monitored the Chinese nuclear program and ascertain what it knew (or believed that it knew) and thought about that program from the late 1950s to the present. Besides investigating U.S.