During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union accepted Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, to facilitate strategic arms control. Now the Cold War has been replaced by asymmetric warfare, and the demise of the Soviet Union has prompted a new set of proliferation nightmares. Treaties based on nuclear overkill and national vulnerability are now outdated, and must be adapted to a far different world. A new strategic concept of Cooperative Threat Reduction is needed to replace MAD. The last wave of creative thinking about strategic arms control crested over four decades ago. This book presents a new strategic concept to deal with the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of asymmetric warfare. The United States has developed cooperative threat reduction programs to safeguard dangerous materials and weapons in the former Soviet Union. These efforts deserve to be expanded and elevated into a central organizing principle to increase national, regional and global security.
