Going Nuclear?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL - 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

The U.S. and Russia are walking away from a landmark arms control treaty. Does that increase the risk of nuclear war?

Before the fear of being blown up by terrorists on a plane, a train, or a sidewalk gave millions of people sleepless nights, it was nuclear annihilation at the hands of the world's two superpowers that people around the globe worried about.

By the mid-1980s, after decades of squaring off in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had amassed 63,000 nuclear weapons. If one of those weapons had ever been used--even accidentally--the resulting nuclear war would have destroyed both sides.

But after years of global protests and skyrocketing defense budgets, American and Soviet leaders stepped back from the brink of disaster and began a process of arms control diplomacy that gradually shrank those arsenals by nearly 90 percent. For decades, that process of diplomacy continued.

Now, however, a landmark arms control treaty--the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or I.N.F.--is being ripped up. The United States announced in February that it would withdraw from the treaty, which bans the possession and deployment of all land-based missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles, because Russia has long been violating its terms.

"We can no longer be restricted by the treaty while Russia shamelessly violates it," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared. In response, Russia said it too would abandon the treaty.

The I.N.F. Treaty between the U.S. and Russia is widely regarded as one of the most important in the history of preventing nuclear war. The U.S. withdrawal from the I.N.F. Treaty prompts a much bigger question: Does this signal the unraveling of all the other arms control treaties that have successfully prevented nuclear war since the end of World War II? And if so, is the world about to get much less safe?

"When this whole structure of agreements begins to collapse, you're back to an arms race where both sides are building up their forces," says Tom Collina, the policy director for the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based organization that seeks to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons. "That leads to increased dangers to both sides and the possibility of getting into nuclear conflict either by intent or by accident."

Fears of Nuclear Armageddon

That tit-for-tat escalation dynamic drove the arms race during the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the West that began after World War II (1939-45). The threat of nuclear war between the two superpowers was so palpable in the 1950s and '60s that "duck and cover" drills became standard in American schools, with children practicing huddling under their desks in case of a Soviet attack (as if a school desk could shield someone from a...