It is no exaggeration to say that arms control has undergone a revolution in the past decade. In the forty years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and began the nuclear age, governments, organizations, and individuals have worked to reduce the threat of wars between great powers employing weapons of mass destruction-nuclear, chemical, and biological. Some progress was made during this period; the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 were the more notable achievements. But progress was always slow, frustrating, and tentative, with no assurance that the whole fabric might not be undone by an increase in superpower tension or by domestic forces in either the United States or USSR hostile to the very concept of arms control.

Based on interviews with participants and research in newly opened archives, the book reveals how the American atomic monopoly affected Stalin's foreign policy, the role of espionage in the evolution of the Soviet bomb, and the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders.

Under Article VI of the NPT, all parties agree "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." The purpose of this paper is to consider the meaning of this language.

When a state develops a nuclear arsenal, these destructive weapons must be initially integrated into existing military forces and initially managed through existing civil and military institutions. The subsequent relationship between nuclear weapons and civil-military relations in possessor states is complex, however, and presents an important two-way puzzle. First, it is important to ask how existing patterns of civil-military relations in nuclear states have influenced the likelihood of nuclear-weapons use. Some scholars believe that military officers are less war-prone and hawkish than civilian leaders; others believe the opposite, that the military tends to be bellicose and biased in favor of aggressive military postures. Which view is right, especially when nuclear weapons are involved, is a question that has not been fully addressed in the literature. Second, it is important to flip the question around and also ask how nuclear weapons have influenced civil-military relations in the states that have acquired the ultimate weapon. Again, the answer is not clear. One might expect that the massive destructive power of these weapons would encourage much greater civilian involvement in military affairs. Yet, at the same time, one might predict that military organizations would maintain significant control over nuclear policy as they want to protect their operational autonomy, and because the perceived need for a prompt response would mitigate against tight civilian control.