Arms Control in the Context of Current US-Russian Relations

The war in Kosovo may be the final nail in the coffin for the sputtering US-Russia bilateral arms control process. Deep cuts in nuclear weapons, an anticipated dividend of the end of the Cold War, have been on hold for years while the START II Treaty languishes in the Russian Duma. Both countries continue to deploy more than 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads. With Russian parliamentary and presidential elections set for December 1999 and June 2000, followed by presidential and congressional elections in the US in November 2000, hopes for serious bilateral negotiations are seemingly on hold for several more years. Depending on the outcome of elections in the two countries, negotiated bilateral deep nuclear cuts could join Stanley Kubrick's famous film as science fiction for the year 2001. How did we end up in this situation a decade after the end of the Cold War, and can anything be done? […]

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