Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

In doing so, the leaders of Russia and the United
States commit themselves to a process of reciprocal
nuclear risk management and support for stable deterrence
and reassurance, a necessary step for further
cooperation on vertical and horizontal disarmament.
However, the United States and Russia cannot proceed
to lower-than-New START reductions without
tacit and explicit cooperation on the part of other current
nuclear weapons states, and even some nuclear
weapons-ready or virtual nuclear weapons states. As
Henry Sokolski has explained:
In addition to making roughly equal reductions with
Russia, then, the United States will have to keep other
nuclear-armed states, such as China and India, from
trying to catch up with U.S. nuclear weapons deployment
levels and—as in the case of India and China,
Pakistan and India, and Japan and China—from trying
to catch up with each other. This means that additional
nuclear restraints, either in the form of nuclear
weapons reductions or further limits on the production
or stockpiling of weapons-usable fuel, will need
to be reached with Russia, of course, but also with China,
India, and Pakistan. As a practical matter, this also
means that other nuclear weapons-ready or virtual
weapons states (e.g., Japan) will have to be persuaded
to curtail or end their production of weapons-usable
materials or to dispose of some portion of what they
currently have. 46
Obama’s vision of a nuclear free world, as he admits,
may not be realized in his lifetime—if ever. But
the avoidance of nuclear war, and the preservation
of a nuclear taboo that has existed since Nagasaki, is
a sufficiently challenging crusade for the rest of the
present century. 47 Managing toward that end will require
international cooperation in nuclear arms control,
nonproliferation, and disarmament that connect
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