Chapter 27 Nuclear Wars

Humanity has been living under the nuclear shadow ever since the only uses of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in an intense nuclear arms race, building nuclear arsenals numbering tens of thousands ready to launch from land, air, and sea delivery systems. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war and led to bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations with binding agreements and treaties setting quantitative and qualitative limitation. The end of the Cold War ushered in a period of deep cuts in US/Soviet/Russian nuclear weapons and a period of relative strategic stability. However, the past decade has seen the return of great-power rivalry, growing regional tensions, and greater salience of nuclear weapons. With the demise of arms control architecture, nuclear modernization in nearly all weapons states, and growing integration of emerging technologies in military planning and weapons systems, the world is facing increasing risks of nuclear weapons use, either inadvertent, accidental, or deliberate.