Looking beyond START

In an excellent front-page story on the prospects for arms reductions beyond current START negotiations, the New York Times' Helene Cooper and Peter Baker turned to Ploughshares Fund and our partners for facts and analysis. "The talks envisioned for 2010 would continue to advance Mr. Obama’s disarmament agenda and attempt what no president has managed since the dark days of the cold war....  the two sides would take aim at thousands of tactical nuclear bombs most vulnerable to theft or proliferation." The Arms Control Association's Daryl Kimball says that the challenge of reaching an accord on tactical nuclear weapons would eclipse the difficulties in drafting the current treaty. “It would make this look like a walk in the park.”  Joe Cirincione agrees, saying that in order to move forward, both sides "are going to have to overcome the resistance of the conservative nuclear bureaucracies in their countries..These are small but still powerful forces.”  The authors consulted the best sources of information about numbers of tactical nuclear weapons and stored strategic warheads (neither of which have previously been subject to treaty), the Arms Control Association, the Center for Defense Information and the Federation of American Scientists, all Ploughshares Fund grantees.