Politics and the Bomb: The Role of Experts in the Creation of Cooperative Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreements (Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics) - Hardcover

"Politics and the Bomb brings new perspectives to the vital question of why states do or do not seek nuclear weapons. Dr. Kutchesfahani reveals the inner workings of communities of technical experts that all governments rely upon in order to understand nuclear threats and develop responses to them."

―James E. Doyle, Los Alamos National Laboratory

"This book treads important new ground in the study of non-proliferation by applying an epistemic community lens to illuminating and explaining two important cases studies: the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program and the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials. Kutchesfahani's approach is sure to be imitated by students and scholars alike in the examination of other case studies of non-proliferation."

―Wyn Bowen, King's College London

Epistemic communities represent networks of knowledge-based experts that help articulate cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems, define the self-interests of a state, or formulate specific policies for state decision makers.   However, the role of these scientists and knowledgeable professionals in nuclear policy formulation is poorly understood. 

Thoroughly documented and making excellent use of source material, Politics and the Bomb provides refreshingly new empirical evidence and theoretical analysis of the importance of scientists and experts behind the creation of new non-proliferation agreements.  Simply not another book on nuclear proliferation, Sara Z. Kutchesfahani explores the differences in the emergence, composition, and influence mechanisms of the epistemic communities behind the nuclear non-proliferation policy formulation in Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program. In doing so she eloquently demonstrates how the role of these non-proliferation experts lead to the possibility of creating more effective non-proliferation policies in the future and hints at the need to sustain non-proliferation epistemic communities in all countries that can provide input to the global proliferation problem until it is solved.