Bridled ambition

Relying on personal interviews with senior officials in a dozen countries and never-before-released classified information, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities explains how and why nine countries - South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, India, Pakistan, and North Korea - have capped, curtailed, or rolled back their nuclear weapons programs during the past few years. Their motivations varied. In the successors of the Soviet Union, for example, the end of the cold war eliminated the initial reason the weapons had been put in place, and…