Late last year, we noted the tenth anniversary of what was probably the most remarkable of all the meetings between an American president and his Soviet counterpart, the Reykjavik Summit of October 1986. History has shown that Reykjavik was a true turning point. Three major treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiated by the end of 1992; they resulted in substantially reduced levels of nuclear weapons. That happened as the Cold War was ending and, as the Russians say, it was no coincidence. A dramatic change in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States made it possible. A readiness, both in Washington and in Moscow, to open a new chapter in their relationship prepared the way.

The world has moved on. The Soviet Union no longer exists. But can we say that the world has been freed from the incessant and pervasive fear of nuclear devastation? Not yet, as this report will show. Persuading three newly independent states to eliminate the nuclear weapons they inherited in the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major achievement. Cooperating with Russia to tighten controls over fissile materials has made a real difference in terms of international security. But illicit trafficking in nuclear materials is still a potential problem and this has happened just as a more brutal form of terrorism, more willing to engage in mass murder, has made its appearance. This threat requires a wide spectrum of responses, but at the heart of it is the need for strict controls over nuclear weapons and fissile materials from the laboratory to the missile silo and every point in between.

The idea of a safer strategic environment involving progressively less reliance on nuclear weapons is still valid and must be pursued. Abolishing nuclear weapons is a feat beyond our present capacity to achieve, but we can go much further than we have to date in eliminating these weapons. The recent U.S.-Russian summit meeting in Helsinki made a start in that direction.

The American relationship with Russia is one among many that require careful tending. It is one of the few that can be said to be vital. We can reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in the Russian-American relationship and that would open the door to many opportunities now denied us.

Global concerns over illicit trafficking in nuclear materials intensified in the 1990s. Some
countermeasures were taken, including steps involving the IAEA. But greater international cooperation, and higher standards of physical protection, may be needed to guard against the chance that weapons-grade material might fall into the wrong hands. This viewpoint article — based on a presentation to the IAEA’s International Conference on Physical
Protection in November 1997 — advocates steps to raise global standards, and to have them monitored internationally.

Risk can be thought of as the product of consequence times probability. No one can assign a number to the probability, for example, that a terrorist gang will acquire a nuclear weapon, although experts think the probability is considerably greater today than at any previous time. We do know, however, that the consequences of a nuclear explosion in any major population center would be catastrophic. The inescapable conclusion is that the global community is facing a very serious risk. What I want to discuss with you today is what is being done to deal with it and what still needs to be done.

Transcript of the first in a series of lectures on  "The U.S.-Russian Strategic Partnership: Premature or Overdue?"

This discussion focused on what Russia and the United States might do to dismantle the nuclear weapons legacy of the Cold War.  Tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads are still held by the two nations.  Wat can be done to rid the world of these weapons?  Can we move beyond START II, and indeed, will the Russian Duma ratify START II? Russia and the United States have the capacity to lead the world into a post-nuclear war era.  The question for today is, will they?

Participants:

AMBASSADOR JAMES E. GOODBY, Distinguished Payne Professor, IIS

Principal Negotiator and Special Representative of the President

for Nuclear Security and Dismantlement, 1995-1996

MR. ALEXANDER YERESKOVSKY

Minister-Counselor, Russian Embassy in the United States

DR. NIKOLAI SOKOV

Fellow, Monterey Institute of International Studies

DR. JOHN STEINBRUNER

Senior Fellow and holder of the Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair in International Security

at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held at the Center for International Security and Arms Control in May 1996. The meeting was the latest in a series that CISAC had held over the years with Russian specialists from the Center for Scientific Research of the Committee of Scientists for Global Security, the Ministry of Defense, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The general rubric under which these meetings were organized is "Strategic Stability to the Year 2000."

The May meeting had a special significance because 1996 was a year of presidential elections in both Russia and the United States, and the prospect of these elections was inevitably reflected in the discussions. But another general point emerged in the meeting, and that was the need to pay more attention to the strategic relationship between Russia and the U.S. Much had been done since the end of the Cold War to wind down the nuclear competition between the two countries, and agreements have been signed to reduce the enormous nuclear arsenals built up during the Cold War. There is much to be done, however, to ensure that this course is continued. The uncertainty
about ratification of START II by the State Duma, and the proposals in the U.S. Congress for deployment of a national ABM system both cast doubt on the possibility of further reductions in strategic offensive arms. The prospects for pushing nuclear weapons into the background of international politics are clouded by the renewed Russian interest in the role of tactical weapons in regional conflicts, and by U.S. interest
in the use of nuclear weapons to deter chemical and biological weapons attacks.

The issues discussed in the conference are embedded in broader political relationships, and this meeting suggested the need for a more intensive and broader strategic dialogue. In both countries there had been a lessening of interest in issues of arms control, but the process of reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons, to which both states are formally committed, is a complex and contentious one, which requires
political trust and careful management. Hence, the importance of a strategic dialogue which examines the conceptual basis of Russian-U.S. relations. Several participants in the conference spoke of the need to transform, or move away from, nuclear deterrence.
Many proposals were advanced for further cooperation in arms control and disarmament. But it is clear that much remains to be done to move Russian-U.S. relations onto a more stable footing.

This article analyses whether the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provides legal authority for International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) efforts to gain more information and more intrusive inspections to assure that non-nuclear-weapons States (NNWS) have joined the NPT are not attempting to make nuclear weapons in violation of that Treaty.

Nuclear war is generally believed to bring risks of destruction out of proportion to any gain that may be secured by the war, or to any loss that may be averted, except perhaps for the loss of national independence and group survival. Nuclear-armed states, however, continue to project military force outside their own territory in order to carry out rivalries for power and influence. Will these rival power projections lead to war, as they often did in the past? If not, how will they be resolved? This paper makes the case that, because of the recognized destructiveness of nuclear weapons, rivalries among major nuclear-armed states for power and influence outside their own territory are not likely to lead to central war among them, but that definite lines separating zones of exclusive security influence, such as prevailed during the Cold War, will reappear where circumstances prevent
other compromises. This conclusion does not hold in the case of nuclear powers that are centrally vulnerable to conventional attack from each other: in that case, nuclear deterrence is less likely to be stable. Where lines are established, they may facilitate rather than prevent cooperation in dealing with the next century's global problems.

It is no exaggeration to say that arms control has undergone a revolution in the past decade. In the forty years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and began the nuclear age, governments, organizations, and individuals have worked to reduce the threat of wars between great powers employing weapons of mass destruction-nuclear, chemical, and biological. Some progress was made during this period; the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 were the more notable achievements. But progress was always slow, frustrating, and tentative, with no assurance that the whole fabric might not be undone by an increase in superpower tension or by domestic forces in either the United States or USSR hostile to the very concept of arms control.