For each presidential administration, it is said, the world is born anew on Inauguration Day. This conceit usually is short-lived, abandoned under the weight of political inheritance and the pressures of an unaccommodating environment (although it does have a disconcerting tendency to reappear selectively in the self-congratulatory memories of public men who strain to stake a claim to innovation and imagination). Non-proliferation was celebrated as one of the Carter presidency's boldest and most venturesome foreign policy initiatives. Jimmy Carter's active efforts to stem the spread of nuclear materials with weapons potential have received due recognition as the first concerted attempt to give proliferation concerns their proper weight in the structuring of international civilian nuclear power. His campaign to keep plutonium out of commercial channels instigated an international debate, at times both acrimonious and agonized, that continues to engage the minds and consciences of political leaders and technical experts worldwide. Four years later, the outcome remains in doubt, and prospects for proliferation of nuclear weapons are unclear. One achievement of the Carter administration, though, is undeniable. No longer is it possible to ignore the intimate tie between the civilian and military applications of atomic power.

Still, the Ford administration had made a critical breakthrough, in attitude if not policies. Two crucial milestones were passed when Gerald Ford accepted the Fri Review's recommendations in October. The international implications of U.S. decisions on nominally domestic questions of nuclear power were frankly recognized; and commercial arrangements were subordinated to an overriding antiproliferation interest, and no longer permitted to be the controlling element in the global exchange of nuclear technologies and skills.