SIPRI monographs

Arms Industry Limited signals the new agenda of the industry that produces weapons. The boom period for the arms industry, nurtured for over forty years by the cold war, is over. While arms-producing companies have experienced previous declines, they were short term and were reversed by the next cycle of massive arms buildups. Today, it would be unrealistic to predict a repeat of the cyclical pattern of ever-increasing military expenditures. Industry has rapidly—within five years—reached a situation in which radical 'down-sizing' of arms production capacities is required.

This study analyses the reasons for and the broad implications of the post-cold war reforms of arms and dual-use export controls in three members of the European Union. It conceptualizes the arms export policy process as a policy system, involving the interaction of three basic elements: the policy environment, policy stakeholders and public policies.

A special feature of Europe's Nordic region is that only one of its states has joined both the European Union and NATO. Nordic countries also share a certain distrust of approaches to security that rely too much on force or that may disrupt the logic and liberties of civil society. Impacting on this environment, the EU's decision in 1999 to develop its own military capacities for crisis management—taken together with other ongoing shifts in Western security agendas and in USA–Europe relations—has created complex challenges for Nordic policy establishments.

Military intervention in a conflict without a reasonable prospect of success is unjustifiable, especially when it is done in the name of humanity. Couched in the debate on the responsibility to protect civilians from violence and drawing on traditional ‘just war’ principles, the central premise of this book is that humanitarian military intervention can be justified as a policy option only if decision makers can be reasonably sure that intervention will do more good than harm.

'Go nuclear' or 'go zero'. As the international community stands at a nuclear crossroads, a number of questions demand urgent attention: How do established and emerging nuclear-armed states manage their nuclear affairs? Who commands and controls a country's nuclear forces? What effect does the balance between secrecy and openness have on larger questions of security and democracy?

The defence industry was one of the pillars of the command economy system in East Central Europe. After the end of the cold war the sector went through dramatic changes: it was radically downsized, reorganized and restructured according to the needs of the emerging new socio-economic systems. One of the major factors that shaped this adjustment was the enlargement of NATO and the European Union and the prospect of integration into these two organizations.

This book provides a survey and an analysis of the scientific discipline of nuclear forensic analysis, and the way it is applied to specific issues of international peace and security, from the 1940s to the present day.

In June 1979 SIPRI organized an international symposium on resolving the numerous problems connected with the destruction or conversion of chemical weapons and the need for a convention prohibiting the possession of these weapons.