Assessing START's impact

The START Treaty "will be signed in Prague on April 8, almost a year to the day U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to begin treaty negotiations and Obama announced, also in Prague, his commitment to a nuclear-weapon-free world," writes Pavel Podvig of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.  Weighing in on the question of whether the treaty cuts nuclear stockpiles by enough, Podvig writes that "whether it is 1,550 warheads or 500 warheads, it's far too many. What is important is that the treaty provides the public with a way to hold the U.S. and Russian governments accountable for the nuclear weapons they possess."

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists