Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read Online Free PDF

is, freeze without Russia’s participation—the number of offensive nuclear weapons platforms it deployed. Arms control acquired iconic status in 1972 with the U.S.-Soviet agreement known as SALT I. Superpower arms-control agreements became central strategic policy. Many politicians and analysts treated arms control as uniquely important among national security issues.
    The 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War brought the superpowers close to nuclear war again—notwithstanding their arms-control talks of the previous year. Soviet and American naval ships drifted into a tense confrontation in the Mediterranean, as the U.S. declared the highest nuclear alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis. As in 1962, cooler heads prevailed, and catastrophe was averted.
    How limited was the influence of arms talks became clear as the Soviet Union began aggressively backing Third World Marxist movements, often with gifts of sophisticated conventional weapons. The Soviets induced Cuba to send soldiers to fight “wars of national liberation” in Africa. These actions revived a policy that strategists called “linkage.” More and more, American politicians and diplomats called for linking strategic arms negotiations to the increasingly bellicose geopolitical conduct of the Soviet Union. Total Soviet warheads surpassed America’s in 1978, with America’s number declining and the Soviets’ count climbing (to a peak in 1986). After the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, ardent arms controllers found that their position—that nuclear arms control is of unique and overriding importance and can be divorced from other considerations—had become politically untenable. “Linkage” became enshrined as a bedrock principle of superpower relations.
    President Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative restored missile defense as a legitimate option to limit the destructiveness of a nuclear attack. In 1987, the U.S. and USSR signed the first true arms-reduction treaty, eliminating their intermediate- and medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles (those that can reach targets roughly 600 to 3,500 miles away). The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, symbolizing liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow’s jackboot. Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union on the last day of 1991, the superpowers negotiated the first major strategic nuclear-warhead-reduction accord—that is, one involving long-range weapons such as ICBMs. The next year, the U.S. unilaterally ended warhead modernization.
    But as the U.S. was making this momentous decision—and as superpower arsenals were plunging, from a peak of 12,000 deployed nuclear warheads in 1992 to 2,200 by 2002—there was a parallel acceleration in what is known in strategic parlance as nuclear proliferation. India (which had in 1974 set off what it called a “peaceful” nuclear explosion) in May 1998 tested a series of nuclear weapons beneath the sands of the Thar Desert near Pakistan. Pakistan followed a fortnight later with its own series of tests within a mountain in the foothills of its west Afghan border, becoming the first nuclear-armed Islamic nation. Nearby, Iran continued its clandestine nuclear weapons program begun in the 1980s. So did North Korea.
    In the middle of this period of nuclear proliferation came the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, whose success raised plausible fears that terrorists could someday strike America using weapons of mass destruction. Such fears were only heightened by North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006 (at an underground location not far from its northernmost coast), while Iran continued its march towards nuclear weapons capability. Enemy states like these, recognizing no restraints on what they do, are fertile soil for nuclear proliferation. Spreading nuclear-weapon-capable technology—for example, to Libya and Syria—has been the hallmark of Pakistan and North Korea.
    Proliferation, however, can sometimes be staved off. The crumbling of the former