Fissiled Future - “We can’t go on the way we are”

DocUticker:  Documents suggest that the fissile material production cutoff was integral to Cold War propaganda and diplomatic campaigns, which helps explain why it failed during the 1960s...  how policymakers debated and discussed it, and why it left the U.S. arms control agenda during the 1970s, although returning during the 1990s. Some of the highlights are

• Eisenhower's early linkage of the cutoff to nuclear proliferation concerns and to short-term U.S. nuclear superiority: "we can't go on the way we are with the nuclear build-up and the spread of capabilities." Nevertheless, if a cutoff was implemented, it would leave the United States with a "very substantial nuclear capability."

• The Joint Chiefs of Staff's changing assessment of a cutoff. Early in the 1960s, they saw a cutoff as "not disadvantageous," but near the end of the decade, they argued that there were enough uncertainties about the future stockpile needs to make it 'impossible to rule out … a potential for significant disadvantage to US interests."

Most of the documents published in this collection are from archival sources, either presidential libraries or the U.S. National Archives.

The recent Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington in April 2010, the participating governments pledged action to strengthen security arrangements for fissile material, but the pledges are nonbinding, with no assurance that they will follow through... Read full here

Haase - Learn from history or become it....