The bomb is back as the risk of nuclear war enters a new age
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons. That era is now over.
Treaties are collapsing, some nuclear powers are strengthening their arsenals, the risk is growing that nuclear weapons will spread more widely and the use of tactical nuclear weapons to gain battlefield advantage is no longer unimaginable. The path to resurgent fears of nuclear war began in 1945, with the first nuclear test blast at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. In 1963, during the throes of America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, President John F.
Kennedy described his fear of a nuclear age without guardrails, in which dozens of nations possess weapons of mass destruction—what he called the “greatest possible danger and hazard." For decades, arms-control agreements, technological challenges and fears of mutually assured destruction kept such a doomsday on the distant horizon. As years passed, U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear warheads grew, then shrank—while China, in recent years, began its ascent.
The global stockpile reached a peak in the mid-1980s, and has since been significantly reduced. In the first Start treaty, signed in 1991, the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to cap the number of their warheads.
But one of the two critical nuclear-arms-control pacts between Russia and the U.S., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, has collapsed. The New Start treaty, which placed even tighter limits on the number of deployed warheads on each side and the missiles and bombers that carry them, expires early next year. Senior officials in Washington now say the U.S.
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