Nuclear Weapons Dangers & Policy Options

Three months after nuclear weapons leveled Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave voice to a dark vision. In a 16 November 1945 speech to the American Philosophical Society, he said, "If they are ever used again, it may well be by the thousands, or perhaps by the tens of thousands." The number of US and Soviet nuclear warheads rose to extremely high levels during the Cold War, giving substance to that vision. With the end of the Cold War, however, the size of the US nuclear stockpile declined dramatically, and the number of Russian nuclear warheads is believed to have dropped in parallel. START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which came into force on 5 December 1994, and New START, which came into force on 5 February of this year, formalized limits on the strategic arsenals of the US and Russia.