The 1990s were a heady decade for disarmament. As Jonathan Schell wrote, the wishes of antinuclear activists “were more than granted: nuclear arsenals were not merely frozen, they were reduced.” In Europe the INF treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles on the continent. Congress forced an end to US nuclear testing in 1992. The first and second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) cut US and Russian arsenals by two-thirds. For the first time since the beginning of the atomic age strategic analysts began to contemplate seriously the prospect of completely eliminating nuclear weapons. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Schell observed, the previous barrier of implausibility fell. Gone was the implacable hostility toward a totalitarian empire. Gone were the obstacles to inspection which had been considered the principal impediment to disarmament. It was now “entirely reasonable to believe that the goal [of disarmament] could be reached.” Prestigious international commissions developed detailed blueprints for moving toward zero nuclear weapons. Retired military officers, led by General George Lee Butler, the former head of US Strategic Command, spoke vocally of the desirability of nuclear abolition. The dawn of a new era seemed in sight as disarmament activists around the world formed a new movement for nuclear abolition.

In Washington and other capitals, however, government leaders failed to take advantage of the favorable climate for disarmament, which as a result was all too brief.