Dismantling the Cold War

foreword by Senator Sam Nunn The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union prompted international concern over the safety and security of the Soviet arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In legislation sponsored by Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, the U. S. Congress approved a program to assist Soviet weapons dismantlement. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program has since authorized more than $1.5 billion for a wide array of weapons destruction, demilitarization, nuclear security, and nonproliferation activities in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. Despite strong bipartisan support, the CTR program has been hindered by a variety of organizational, technical, and political problems. Both donors and recipients have heatedly debated its effectiveness. Misinformation about the program abounds in the NIS as well as in the U.S. Congress, where program funding has been threatened by growing opposition to anything that might resemble foreign aid. Dismantling the Cold War is the first systematic assessment of the CTR program. It provides both insiders' views of how the complex policy initiative was conceived and "in-country" views of how it was carried out. This frank assessment of what U.S.-NIS cooperation has and has not accomplished offers programmatic, political, fiscal, organizational, and technical suggestions to help U.S. and NIS policymakers cope with the world's paramount proliferation threat. Contributors Oleg Bukharin, Richard Combs, Gloria Duffy, Dastan Eleukenov, Rose Gottemoeller, Kostyantyn Hryshchenko, Katherine E. Johnson, Oumirserik Kasenov, Igor Khripunov, Murat Laumulin, Evgeni P. Maslin, R. Adam Moody, Michael H. Newlin, Sam Nunn, Vladimir A. Orlov, Vyachaslau E. Paznyak, Alexander A. Pikayev, William C. Potter, John M. Shields, Jessica Eve Stern CSIA Studies in International Security