End of the Cold War, Nuclear Proliferation, and Rogue States

The reforms inaugurated by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and the subsequent ending of the Cold War in the late 1980s dramatically reduced nuclear tensions between East and West. The superpowers agreed to notable advances in arms limitation. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty (1987) banned all intermediate ballistic and cruise missiles, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I, 1991) limited each side's strategic nuclear weapons.

In the 1990s negotiations resumed toward a comprehensive test ban treaty, a process backed by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1993. Although progress stalled—notably because of French testing in the South Pacific (1995), a move widely condemned by environmental groups—the original five nuclear powers (United States, Russia, France, Britain, and China) signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on 24 September 1996.

Dealing with the environmental consequences of nuclear technology remained a significant issue at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Accidents at nuclear installations such as Windscale, Britain (1957), Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania (1979), and Chernobyl, Ukraine (1986), attested to the risks associated with developing peaceful nuclear energy. Weapons testing and decommissioning engendered similar risks, May 2002 the Russian premier Vladimir Putin and the U.S.

President George W. Bush agreed to reduce numbers of operationally deployed weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. arsenal contained more titan thirty thousand warheads, and the Soviet Union had forty-five thousand, These vast stockpiles of nuclear materials required careful monitoring and safe disposal. In the former Soviet Union, more than seventy ill-maintained nuclear submarines lay rusting off the Kola Peninsula awaiting decommissioning.

The sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea in August 2000— killing 118 crew members and threatening to contaminate local marine ecology with plutonium—was seen as symptomatic of the long-term dangers posed by Russia's ailing nuclear fleet.

Nuclear proliferation became a major concern to the international community. India exploded a 2- 5-kiloton device, code-named "Smiling Buddha," at Pokharan Test Site in the Rajasthan Desert on 18 May 1974. In May 1998 another three tests were undertaken, corresponding with detonation of the first atomic devices by neighbor and adversary Pakistan.

Strategic analysts emphasized the danger of theft or sale of nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union to "rogue states," while U.N. inspectors continued to demand access to military facilities in North Korea and Iraq to determine their nuclear capabilities. In response to the threat posed by terrorism, in 2002 the Bush administration made clear its desire to modernize and update the U.S. nuclear arsenal to cope with new, mobile targets.

Interpreting the Nuclear Age. Since 1953 members of the public have visited the Trinity test site, the original ground zero in New Mexico, for glimpses of Armageddon in the twisted structures and desert craters of the region. Hiroshima Peace Park has similarly provided somber reflection on the social and ecological costs of atomic weaponry.

The nuclear age brought unrivaled environmental risks. At the same time, secret nuclear installations of the Cold War became de facto wildlife sanctuaries, with restrictions on public access and vast areas of untamed land providing protection for rare species of flora and fauna.

On 8 June 2000, President Bill Clinton created Hanford Reach Historical and Ecological National Monument in Washington State, preserving a rare shrub-steppe ecosystem on the site of the former nuclear facility. That coyotes and bald eagles have been seen wandering test ranges testifies to the complexity of the nuclear age and its environmental legacy.