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 The 81 SS-25 single-warhead missiles placed in Belarus by the Soviet Union will be withdrawn and probably redeployed on Russian territory.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.

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 debate about appropriate purposes and policies for U.S. nuclear weapons has been under way since the beginning of the nuclear age. With the end of the Cold War, the debate has entered a new phase, propelled by the post-Cold War transformations of the international political landscape. This volume--based on an exhaustive reexamination of issues addressed in The Future of the U.S.-Soviet Nuclear Relationship (NRC, 1991)--describes the state to which U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and policies have evolved since the Cold War ended. The book evaluates a regime of progressive constraints for future U.S. nuclear weapons policy that includes further reductions in nuclear forces, changes in nuclear operations to preserve deterrence but enhance operational safety, and measures to help prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons. In addition, it examines the conditions and means by which comprehensive nuclear disarmament could become feasible and desirable.

Describes environmental, safety, and health problems throughout the nuclear weapons complex and what the U.S. Dept. of Energy is doing to address them. Covers: building nuclear warheads: the process; wastes and other byproducts of the cold war (spent nuclear fuel, plutonium residues, radioactive waste, transuranic waste, hazardous waste, etc.); contamination and cleanup; an international perspective; transition to new missions; and looking to the future. Over 100 b/w photos. Extensive glossary and bibliography.

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.