First paragraph of the book chapter:

How quickly could individual governments, starting from different levels of nuclear-related expertise and technology, develop a nuclear weapon if they chose to do so? This question—which I will call the “nuclear latency” question—is both exceedingly important and poorly understood. It is important because an accurate understanding of both underlying state capabilities and the time needed to utilize such capabilities is necessary to analyze a wide set of nuclear policy issues: for example, dealing with the Iran nuclear crisis (how quickly could Tehran make a weapon from its stockpile of low–enriched uranium?); understanding the relationship between the spread of civilian nuclear power and the spread of nuclear weapons capability (will new civilian programs make breakout to military programs easier and more likely?); evaluating potential NPT reforms (what would be the effects of lengthening the ninety-day notice in the Article X withdrawal clause?); or assessing the stability of a world without nuclear weapons (could disarmed states rearm in five days, five weeks, five months, or five years?). Despite widespread discussion of these policy issues, however, a set of mirror-image analytic failures has limited our ability to make clear predictions about nuclear latency and proliferation: Political scientists working on these subjects have often failed to examine basic technical factors regarding the nuclear fuel cycle that strongly influence how quickly states can get the bomb; the more technical literature about nuclear latency has similarly often failed to examine the political factors that strongly influence the ability of a government to develop nuclear weapons.

Over the past two decades, Indonesia's coal industry has transformed itself from being an unknown, minor player in Asia's coal markets to the world's largest exporter of steam coal. In what is likely the most detailed analysis of the Indonesian coal industry ever released, Dr. Bart Lucarelli tells the story of how Indonesia created this world-scale industry over two decades despite challenges created by widespread government corruption, a weak legal system, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the fall of the Soeharto government in 1998.

The paper argues that key physical and technical factors, along with regulatory and political factors, have acted as the primary drivers of the industry's phenomenal growth over the past two decades and will be the most important factors for consideration over the next two decades.  It also discusses current estimates of Indonesia's coal resources and reserves, the role played by location and geological factors in the development of its coal resources, the future impacts of the passage of Indonesia's Mining Law of 2009 and its related implementing regulations, and how these issues might affect the coal industry's structure and performance before 2020.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have a common technological foundation. In pursuit of a civilian fuel cycle-making fuel, building reactors to burn the fuel, and dealing with nuclear waste, which might include extracting some valuable by-products of spent reactor fuel-a nation can develop the capability of producing the material necessary for a bomb, either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Under civilian cover, North Korea developed a fuel cycle ideally suited to harboring a latent capability for weapons production. In fact, although the country now has the bomb, it does not have much of a nuclear arsenal or any nuclear-generated electricity.

In the 1970s, South Korea was also interested in the bomb, but it gave up those aspirations and, with international assistance, turned its nuclear focus to civilian energy. Today the South Korean nuclear power industry provides nearly 40 percent of the country's electricity, and South Korea is in a position to become a major international exporter of nuclear power plants. The factors that led North Korea to build the bomb and those that led South Korea to forsake it can be instructive for the United States in formulating a policy to restrain Iran's nuclear weapon ambitions, although the political situation there is dramatically different.