The intelligence community's flawed assessment of Iraq's weapons systems--and the Bush administration's decision to go to war in part based on those assessments--illustrates the political and policy challenges of combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In this comprehensive assessment, defense policy specialists Jason Ellis and Geoffrey Kiefer find disturbing trends in both the collection and analysis of intelligence and in its use in the development and implementation of security policy.

Analyzing a broad range of recent case studies--Pakistan's development of...