The National Security Archive has released a new electronic briefing book on U.S. opposition to the Taiwanese nuclear program in the 1970’s.
As is usual of the Archive’s excellent briefing books, compiled from documents acquired under FOIA and annotated with expert commentary, this new one presents a narrative by William Burr and links to PDFs of about 55 documents on U.S. diplomacy with Taiwan on the nuclear issue.
The documents show that counter-proliferation diplomacy is hard even with friendly states, to say nothing of countries like North Korea or Iran:
Even a dependent ally, such as Taiwan, tried hard to resist U.S. pressures to abandon suspect nuclear activities and kept Washington guessing whether it had really given them up.
The briefing book is part of a new Nuclear Vault section of the National Security Archive’s website. It’s pretty spiffy with all the nuclear-related briefing books organized by state and topic area.