This book is not about the history of nuclear arms control. It is instead about its possible future. A page of history nevertheless helps us understand where nuclear arms control might go and to appreciate why, as the title of this book suggests, nuclear arms control at the moment is in peril.

On July 16, 1945 the US tested the first atomic bomb. On August 29, 1949 the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. Finding themselves in a world in which two antagonists possessed weapons of enormous destructive power, political leaders began to consider possibilities for negotiating arrangements that might place those weapons under agreed limitations and controls. Progress in the first decade was unsteady. Countries reached a modest milestone in 1957 when they created the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, a multilateral organization intended to support the peaceful use of nuclear technology and, ‘so far as it is able’, to ensure that nuclear technology transferred to countries without nuclear weapons is used only for peaceful ends. The US, the USSR, and the UK— the last having tested its first atomic bomb in 1952— at length agreed to stop nuclear tests in space, the atmosphere, and oceans. However, the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which the US, the USSR, and the UK adopted in 1963, did not place any other limits on the nuclear arsenals of these three countries, and it placed no obligation whatsoever on other countries. As for the IAEA, its governing statute left it to individual states to decide how, and whether, they would engage with the new Agency. No legally binding instrument with widespread membership did anything in itself to limit countries’ freedom to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. With France having tested its first atomic bomb in 1960, and China having received technical support from the USSR to expedite its own development efforts— China would test its first bomb in 1964— concern grew that the spread of nuclear weapons was only beginning. US President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, the year of the test ban treaty, apprehended that in another decade or so as many as 25 countries would have nuclear weapons.