Перевод

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     A central task of U.S. security policy is to manage the nation's nuclear arsenal, by far the largest in the world. Nuclear weapons, which are strategic forces, play a vital role in military strategy that fundamentally departs from the role played by nonnuclear, or conventional, forces. Since their first and only wartime use—by the United States against Japan in August 1945—nuclear weapons have remained unused but "absolute weapons," capable of obliterating foreign enemies—and possibly the entire global population—in one swift blow (Brodie 1946). The Soviet Union's successful test of a nuclear bomb in 1949 transformed the cold war balance of power into a "delicate balance of terror" (Wohlstetter 1959).

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     Despite the peaceful ending of the U.S.-Soviet arms race, the perils posed by nuclear weapons are more acute than ever. By 2004 a record nine countries had the materials and means to deliver nuclear weapons (see Table 10.3 and Map 9, Nuclear Threats and U.S. Defense Installations, in map section). These countries included India and Pakistan, bitter rivals in South Asia, and North Korea, an impoverished dictatorship with an affinity for ballistic missile exports and nuclear blackmail. Israel also maintained a nuclear arsenal, although its government refused to confirm or deny this fact. Russia's vast nuclear stockpile, although still formidable, has degraded since the collapse of the Soviet Union. [ 9 ] Meanwhile, Iran's government has proclaimed its "nuclear rights," and private terrorist groups covet fissionable materials and ballistic missiles on transnational black markets (see Stern 1999).

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     The enduring menace posed by nuclear weapons, a standard feature of twenty-first-century world politics, was not inevitable. Just after World War II, the United States proposed placing all the world's nuclear materials, including its own, under the control of a UN-sponsored international authority. The Soviet Union opposed this Baruch Plan, named after U.S. financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, because it allowed the U.S. government to maintain its monopoly of nuclear weapons technology. Soviet leaders, who were three years away from testing their own nuclear weapon, also distrusted the UN and U.S. allies in the Security Council. By the 1970s, Soviet nuclear as well as conventional forces had reached parity with those maintained by the United States. The U.S. nuclear arse­nal, though, was more accurate and better protected within its "triad" of delivery systems—underground silos, strategic bombers, and nuclear submarines. Clearly, the nuclear arms race, which included Great Britain, France, and China by the late 1960s, had progressed beyond the point of no return.

     Efforts to restrain this arms race quickly became a foreign policy priority. Beginning in the early 1970s, the SALT and START treaties placed limits on U.S. and Soviet stockpiles and delivery systems, and then provided for deep cuts after the cold war. The Treaty of Moscow signed by the United States and Russia in 2002 called for ten-year reductions in active nuclear stockpiles to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads on each side.[10] As for multilateral accords, the United States signed the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that came into force in 1970 and that by 2002 had gained the signatures of 187 governments. Earlier, the U.S. government had signed the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space. How­ever, Congress's rejection in 1998 of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which called for a ban on all nuclear testing, signaled a U.S. turn away from multilateral cooperation in nuclear arms control.

 

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