North Korea refused a visit by the new U.S. envoy charged with discussing its proliferation efforts.
O'Brien told the FSA executives that Iran was using state-owned institutions – Bank Sepah, Bank Melli and Bank Saderate – to facilitate its proliferation efforts and its support for terrorism.
"We will continue to use all of our authorities to undermine the Syrian government's W.M.D. proliferation efforts within Syria as well as around the world".
The companies designated for sanctions on Wednesday include several that the Treasury said "are being used to advance the regime's proliferation efforts" and which are linked to the agency responsible "for developing and producing nonconventional weapons and the missiles to deliver them".
Bethe later urged several U.S. presidents to restrict proliferation, efforts that helped lead to the atmospheric test ban in 1963 and controls on antiballistic missile systems in 1972.
North Korea and Iran, one claiming already to have the bomb, the other suspected of wanting one, are threatening to up-end the global anti-proliferation effort.
It should, however, fear nuclear proliferation, and hence any overturning of the test ban, since that would blow to bits the whole anti-proliferation effort.
The 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Groupp (NSG), its next destination, might prove stickier.Several NSG members, including Austria and Ireland, are concerned about the deal's ramifications for the anti-proliferation effort.
The revelation in 2004 that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man still feted in Pakistan as the father of its bomb, had turned his country's illicit procurement network into a private and hugely profitable supply chain, ready to sell all sorts of nuclear kit to others, was a huge blow to the global anti-proliferation effort.
The administration argued that the treaty would make America safer by hampering the efforts of Russia, China and others to produce new, more threatening nuclear weapons and by strengthening support for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the main anti-proliferation effort.
All this uncertainty suggests 2017 could be a problematic year for global nuclear non-proliferation efforts.
