ABSTRACT
Tens of thousands of nuclear warheads are being disabled, transported, and will be dismantled and many of them destroyed, according to commitments of the USA and Russia. The United States and Russia essentially eliminate their tactical nuclear weapons, commit irrevocably all nuclear weapons, a certain number of designated strategic weapons, to the process of dismantlement and destruction, and transfer all weapons-usable plutonium and uranium to the civil energy sector under international safeguards. The acceptability of deterrence is posed most starkly in the case of confrontation with a dictatorship or autocracy such as that of Saddam Hussein. Nuclear weapons storage, inspection, monitoring, and refabrication facilities would have to be available to the United Nations, and appropriate restrictions placed upon these facilities to prevent access by others. In a world in which nations are likely to persist and conflicts of various kinds continue, the devastating power of nuclear weapons will long be of concern.
