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Intro

As the fall of the Soviet Union appeared eminent, the United States and their allies began to worry about the concept that the nuclear weapons held in smaller countries by the Soviet Union could fall or would fall into enemy hands. In 1986, a congressional meeting was held to decide what to do about this problem. It was beginning to look as if the soviet union was ready to begin negotiating about weapons destruction and control, specifically when it came to the large amount of nuclear weapons that were accumulated the nuclear escalation period.. Two senators, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, established the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program stating “the program’s goal is to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction in states of the former Soviet Union and beyond” . This program was granted 400 million dollars each year for a total of four years. This act marked the beginning of Nuclear De-escalation with a common goal of downsizing nuclear stockpiles at the end of the Cold War.  

Contributions

The Cooperative Threat Reduction Act was a major contributor to De-Escalation of nuclear weapon arsenals. This program was used for “the transportation, storage, safeguarding and destruction of nuclear and other weapons in the Soviet Union… and to assist in the prevention of weapons proliferation”. One contribution by the Nunn-Lugar program has been the “delivery of equipment to accelerate the dismantlement of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles” to the Soviet Union (Lockwood, 8).  This program made important contributions in the disarmament of nuclear warheads in many counties. An important contribution of the Nunn-Lugar program has been to facilitate the elimination of former Soviet strategic weapons outside of Russia, particularly in Ukraine (Lockwood, 8). There were many countries that had Soviet Union nuclear weapons. Two others included Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Cooperative Threat Reduction Act helped Russia move the nuclear arsenals in these countries back to Russia or dismembering these weapons in these countries. The United States sent “nearly 700 emergency response items to help guarantee safe and secure transportation of nuclear weapons” to Belarus for the aid of the elimination of nuclear power in this country (Deni and Lockwood, 21). The Cooperative Threat Reduction Act played a major role in a huge decrease in the quantity of nuclear weapons that had been stockpiled during the nuclear escalation period.

Another important contribution was when the United States sent storage containers to Russia to store fissionable material under their control. The United States provided “10,000 fissile material storage containers by the end of 1995 and a total of nearly 33,000 containers by early 1997” (Deni and Lockwood, 21). These containers aided in Russia’s ability to store nuclear material from dismantled warheads. Another contribution from the United States to Russia was “75 million dollars to help Russia build a new fissile material storage facility at Chelyabinsk for plutonium “pits” from dismantled warheads” (Deni and Lockwood, 21). The Nuclear Threat Reduction program was not just used to remove everything fissionable from Russia; it also included ideas for safe storage and transportation of fissionable material in Russia built up during the Cold War and nuclear escalation.

Today   

               Nuclear threat reduction is still an issue, even for current presidents. Although the budget for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program has been cut every year since the Obama administration began, the United States still faces many issues when it comes to agreements with Russia in nuclear arms reduction. In 2009, President Obama had plans to “reset” nuclear relations with Russia, including a plan to further reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals (Zarate, 59). This is during the expiration of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was set to expire in December, 2009 (Zarate, 60).

In President Obama’s second term, “The crisis in Ukraine probably has ruined prospects for another formal Russian-U.S. arms control agreement during the Obama administration’s second term" (Weitz, 15). As far as reducing nuclear weapons in other countries, there is more of a chance of an agreement. The idea of “countering nuclear weapons proliferation to states and to nonstate actors, the prospects are somewhat better, given mutual Russian and U.S. concerns in that area” (Weitz, 15). There are still many agreements that have been proposed that can be passed between the United States and Russia as far as nuclear weapons and the control and elimination of them are concerned. As time progresses, the threat of nuclear weapons and the money needed to spend on the elimination of them diminishes. The Cooperative Threat Reduction program has faced many budget cuts since its beginning in 1986 because the program was “created to deal with yesterday’s strategic weapons and yesterday’s threats have largely diminished” (Liimatainen, 20).