Dismantling The Nuclear Weapons Legacy Of The Cold War

Nuclear arms reduction agreements and parallel commitments since 1987 will remove from active deployment about 27,000 former Soviet Union bombs and warheads. When START I and II are fully implemented, Russia will have eliminated 1,000 strategic delivery vehicles and removed from active deployment 4,500 strategic warheads. Ukraine will give up 176 SS-19s and -24s and 1,240 strategic warheads as well as cruise missile warheads. Kazakhstan will relinquish 104 SS-18s and 1,040 strategic warheads. The 81 SS-25 single-warhead missiles placed in Belarus by the Soviet Union will be withdrawn and probably redeployed on Russian territory. The United States will eliminate over 1,300 strategic delivery vehicles under the START agreements, and will remove from active deployment more than 6,000 strategic warheads. These reductions, in terms of systems scheduled for elimination and the destructive potential they represent, amount to the greatest program of disarmament in human history. The process also signals a change in relations between Washington and Moscow, if only by dramatically reversing the trend to increase nuclear weapons targeted against each other's homeland.

The breakup of the Soviet Union left a cold war nuclear legacy consisting of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and a sprawling infrastructure for their production and maintenance. This book examines the fate of this vast nuclear weapon complex and the unprecedented non-proliferation challenges associated with the breakup of a nuclear weapon state. It describes the high-level diplomatic bargaining efforts to consolidate in Russia the nuclear weapons based in newly independent Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine and to strengthen central control over these weapons. It surveys the problems associated with dismantling nuclear weapons and the difficulties involved in safely storing and disposing of large stockpiles of fissile material. It reviews the key provisions of the principal nuclear arms control measures and initiatives, including the START I and START II treaties. Finally, the book assesses the contribution of international assistance programmes to the denuclearization process under way in the former Soviet Union.

First published in 1997, this volume builds its discussion on a technological base along with policy implications, and constitutes a review of the current situation in international security created by the Cold War, and how the end of the Cold War is likely to change the situation. As the close of the Cold War created a multitude of changes in international security, resulting in a broad range of topics tackled in this collection. It features specialists in military technology, physics, political science, public and international affairs.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program has since authorized more than $1.5 billion for a wide array of weapons destruction, demilitarization, nuclear security, and nonproliferation activities in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union.

Nuclear arms reduction agreements and parallel commitments since 1987 will remove from active deployment about 27,000 former Soviet Union bombs and warheads. When START I and II are fully implemented, Russia will have eliminated 1,000 strategic delivery vehicles and removed from active deployment 4,500 strategic warheads. Ukraine will give up 176 SS-19s and -24s and 1,240 strategic warheads as well as cruise missile warheads. Kazakhstan will relinquish 104 SS-18s and 1,040 strategic warheads. The 81 SS-25 single-warhead missiles placed in Belarus by the Soviet Union will be withdrawn and probably redeployed on Russian territory. The United States will eliminate over 1,300 strategic delivery vehicles under the START agreements, and will remove from active deployment more than 6,000 strategic warheads. These reductions, in terms of systems scheduled for elimination and the destructive potential they represent, amount to the greatest program of disarmament in human history. The process also signals a change in relations between Washington and Moscow, if only by dramatically reversing the trend to increase nuclear weapons targeted against each other's homeland.

This second volume identifies and evaluates Cold War residual consequences, especially those related to nuclear weapons and their evolution. It provides a knowledgeable assessment of current risks and future potential of peaceful nuclear technology and inherited nuclear weapons. In this revised edition, a comparative assessment has been included of the nuclear accidents at Fukushima (Japan), Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island reactors. The respective roles of the three volumes in "Nuclear Insights" Volume 1 is a insider history of nuclear weapons development during the Cold War, and Volume 3 is a technically informed perspective about nuclear reductions and arms control. Thus, Volume 2 reports on and examines current nuclear technology, peaceful applications, and proliferation risks. All three volumes are unique, having originated with a written collaboration by four nuclear scientists and engineers, from both sides of the Cold War Iron Curtain, all of whom had hands-on experience with nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.

Epistemic communities represent networks of knowledge-based experts that help articulate cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems, define the self-interests of a state, or formulate specific policies for state decision makers. However, the role of these scientists and knowledgeable professionals in nuclear policy formulation is poorly understood. Thoroughly documented and making excellent use of source material, Politics and the Bomb provides refreshingly new empirical evidence and theoretical analysis of the importance of scientists and experts behind the creation of new non-proliferation agreements. Simply not another book on nuclear proliferation, Sara Z. Kutchesfahani explores the differences in the emergence, composition, and influence mechanisms of the epistemic communities behind the nuclear non-proliferation policy formulation in Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program. In doing so she eloquently demonstrates how the role of these non-proliferation experts lead to the possibility of creating more effective non-proliferation policies in the future and hints at the need to sustain non-proliferation epistemic communities in all countries that can provide input to the global proliferation problem until it is solved.