nuclear-news

The president had hoped that before his term ended U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons could be limited to ceilings of about 1,000 warheads for each country. That was going to be hard to do even without a pause, given disputes over U.S. ballistic-missile defense programs and Russian short-range nuclear weapons. Now the odds are against any U.S.-Russian treaty calling for deeper reductions than those already achieved in the 2011 New Start treaty during the remaining years of the Obama administration.

It is a lost opportunity, but does it matter? Mutual assured destruction, the essence of U.S. deterrence policy during the Cold War, remains a condition of life in the 21st century. It will remain so for as long as thousands of nuclear weapons continue to exist. Ninety percent of those nuclear warheads are held by the United States and Russia. So, yes, that lost opportunity makes a difference…… http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/opinion/global/the-end-of-a-nuclear-era.html