Rise and Fall of START II: The Russian Perspective

Abstract:

When Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) in Moscow in January 1993, Yeltsin called it "the treaty of hope." This was to be the beginning of a new Russia and a new kinship with the West. Nuclear arsenals, distended beyond any reasonable measure during the Cold War, would be slashed; economic investments, the key to societal transformation, were to grow steadily in the glow of the new strategic arrangement. Trade and treaties would replace tension and terror as the new foundations of Russia's relationship with the wealthy West.