Originally published in 1983, this book presents both the technical and political information necessary to evaluate the emerging threat to world security posed by recent advances in uranium enrichment technology. Uranium enrichment has played a relatively quiet but important role in the history of efforts by a number of nations to acquire nuclear weapons and by a number of others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For many years the uranium enrichment industry was dominated by a single method, gaseous diffusion, which was technically complex, extremely capital-intensive, and highly inefficient in its use of energy. As long as this remained true, only the richest and most technically advanced nations could afford to pursue the enrichment route to weapon acquisition. But during the 1970s this situation changed dramatically. Several new and far more accessible enrichment techniques were developed, stimulated largely by the anticipation of a rapidly growing demand for enrichment services by the world-wide nuclear power industry. This proliferation of new techniques, coupled with the subsequent contraction of the commercial market for enriched uranium, has created a situation in which uranium enrichment technology might well become the most important contributor to further nuclear weapon proliferation. Some of the issues addressed in this book are: A technical analysis of the most important enrichment techniques in a form that is relevant to analysis of proliferation risks; A detailed projection of the world demand for uranium enrichment services; A summary and critique of present institutional non-proliferation arrangements in the world enrichment industry, and An identification of the states most likely to pursue the enrichment route to acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Tom Lantos was a Hungarian-born U.S. Congressman remembered for raising awareness and respect for human rights around the world. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980 becoming the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the Congress. In 1983 he co-founded and chaired the Congressional Human Rights Caucus renamed in his honour as the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. With articles authored by leading academics this Festschrift remembers Tom Lantos's extensive human rights activism on the human rights themes he was passionately involved with around the world. The essays offer new insights on a range of topical human rights issues, such as human rights education, religious freedom, post-conflict justice, minority rights and identity politics.