October 16, 2025
Dr. Ian Stewart, CNS’s Executive Director in Washington, DC, has published a new article in the Journal of Strategic Trade Control entitled “Finally a Functional Regime: the reconvening of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in the 1990s.”
Coming in the group’s 50th-anniversary year, the article contains an important re-examination of the NSG’s history through the 1970s and 1990s, benefitting from materials recently released by the U.K. National Archives.
The article revisits the evolution of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, including its reformation in the 1990s and its lack of meetings from 1978 to the 1990s. It argues that the NSG was an incomplete regime when it met in the 1970s and that the reason for this can be traced to France’s opposition to full-scope safeguards as a condition of supply. The article also examines the implications of the incomplete NSG and its lack of meetings in the late 1970s and 1980s, including for the nuclear programs of Iraq and Pakistan.
The article then examines the reconvening of the NSG in the 1990s and what had changed to allow a resumption of meetings and the steps that were taken to set up the NSG as, finally, a functional regime.
