This sobering account is essential reading for all those interested in more effective programs to reduce proliferation threats around the world, and for those interested in the nitty-gritty of how national security agencies manage or fail to manage new and unfamiliar challenges.
Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, author of Securing the Bomb
Weiner provides an important snapshot of the Soviet WMD complex at the end of the Cold War and after. She then uses her thorough and detailed analysis of the U.S. government's effort to stem proliferation of WMD expertise from the former Soviet Union to demonstrate how and why U.S. institutions succeeded and failed in their missions to stop proliferation from that complex, and how they shaped the national security agenda in the process. The book is a significant contribution to the study of the role of institutional politics in national security, non-proliferation, and U.S.-Russian relations.
Pavel Podvig, research associate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and editor of Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces
Our Own Worst Enemy? is a must-read for scholars, policymakers, and other readers with an interest in how government decisions get made and why it has been so hard to control the spread of knowledge about nuclear weapons.
Cindy Williams, principal research scientist, Security Studies Program at MIT, and co-author with Gordon Adams of Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home
Sharon K. Weiner's book should provoke the United States and Russia to do better at one of the greatest proliferation challenges of the era—preventing the spread of knowledge about weapons of mass destruction and cleaning up the legacy of the Cold War.
David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, and author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
Winner, 2012 Louis Brownlow award, awarded by the National Academy of Public Administration.
