Iran’s leaders have worked to pursue nuclear energy technology since the 1950s, spurred by the launch of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. It made steady progress, with Western help, through the early 1970s. But concern over Iranian intentions followed by the upheaval of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 effectively ended outside [...]

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Those are the 40-plus countries with the scientists, engineers and infrastructure for building bombs — and in at least one other case, that of South Africa, a history of having done so.
About a dozen are nuclear “rollback” states, ranging from Sweden and Switzerland, which seriously researched the weapon option in the 1950s and 1960s and [...]

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Despite successes in the last few decades, China’s armed forces are still rather backward, which is another incentive for increasing military spending. Its ground forces are relatively numerous, but it does not have enough modern military hardware; its army air defense system is weak, and its artillery is insufficiently mobile. The same is true of [...]

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Forest clearing to create more farmland has destroyed the precarious balance of a fragile ecosystem.
In the 1950s, the government built the Hongyashan reservoir on the Shiyang River and in the three decades that followed, residents dug more than 10,000 wells. The positive economic impact was immediate: Minqin County became the top producer of wheat and [...]

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Fighting transnational terrorism often involves making unsavory choices between protecting civil rights and providing security. The following regimes have opted for the latter and are definitely not the kind of places you want to get caught if you’re plotting some terrorist mayhem.
France
Key tactics: Though many Americans view them as softies when it comes to the [...]

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