[en] This paper argues that deterrence is the best that can be done in a world of sovereign states, but deterrence cannot last forever, and nothing less than unconditional assurance is acceptable when survival is at stake. To accumulate more or better weapons tends to accelerate the arms race, raise tension levels, and produce insecurity. And yet to get rid of weapons by unilateral or even agreed means tends to tempt international adventurism, to arouse fears about vulnerability and weakness, and thus to produce insecurity. As a result, an uneasy compromise has evolved since Nagasaki. Its components are a continuous flow of new weapons systems, more or less matched by a continuous effort to manage risks in various ways including arms control arrangements, summit meetings, and various efforts at command and control. One of the most massive efforts at reassurance has been associated in the last few years with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the ideal war-maker's approach to nuclearism by way of the most elaborate technological fix ever conceived

[en] We are in the midst of a significant but tortured shift in consciousness concerning the nuclear threat. At precisely such a time, we would do well to consider what might be an appropriate set of convictions - appropriate psychologically and in terms of life enhancement. The 10 principles the authors wish to elaborate are simple ones, already adopted by a growing number of people. We face a new dimension of destruction - not a matter of disaster or even of a war - but rather of an end; an end to human civilization and perhaps humankind. This concept violates our ignored mental constructs concerning human continuity: though we can imagine particular cultures being impaired or even destroyed, we expect humankind to heal itself sufficiently to survive. But the findings of a possible ''nuclear winter'' effect concretize the idea of a nuclear end, and, however grim, serve the imagination in the difficult task of looking into the abyss in order to see beyond it. The image of the nuclear end includes not only death and suffering on the most massive scale but, beyond that, nothingness. Two relatively recent historical events, the Nazi holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assist that kind of imaginative act

[en] As a result of this creeping attrition of its principles, the United States finds itself today more and more tempted to lower its standards and to pursue the same sordid practices as the Soviets. Indeed, the process of moral deterioration the United States is suffering seems to prove the old French adage that one tends to acquire the visage of one's adversary. The Bulletin is observing its fortieth anniversary at a critical point in the evolution of U.S. policy toward other governments and the rest of humanity. U.S. representatives are just beginning a negotiation which the president has probably already doomed to failure by abruptly announcing his Star Wars project and insisting on its irrevocable nature. Barring a congressional refusal to fund it, this extravagant and reckless scheme may well mean the end of any serious efforts to gain control of the nuclear arms spiral, for, once the rhythm of negotiation is again broken, it may prove impossible to restore - particularly as the buildup of new types of nuclear weapons defeats the possibilities of verification

[en] The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nucler Weapons has the twin objectives of stopping the further spread of nuclear weapons and ending the nuclear arms race on the one hand, and promoting peaceful uses of atomic energy on the other. In quantitative and symbolic terms the NPT is a huge success. More than two-thirds of the world's nations have signed on, making this the most popular arms control agreement on earth. Not a single nation has declared itself to be a nuclear-weapons state beyond the original five members of the ''nuclear club'' who qualified for weapons status under the terms of the Treaty itself: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. No party to the Treaty has exercised the permitted option to drop out, and none has been found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to have diverted nuclear material from civil to weapons purposes. Nor has any party been known to have violated NPT prohibitions on developing or assisting other nations to develop nuclear weapons

[en] Civilian nuclear electric power today is both successful and unsuccessful, in ways that are astonishingly different from many expectations of only a decade ago. In the United States, for example, with one-third of the world's installed nuclear power capacity, many reactors are running well; some have recently come into service almost on time and almost within budget. However, many others have been canceled or are now likely to be canceled, far over budget and long delayed. And the projections made in the late 1960s for 1,000 gigawatts (one GW is a billion watts) of installed capacity by the year 2000 have been revised drastically downward. The 1985 projections are for 125 GW or less by the end of the century. Elsewhere, however, nuclear power is in less trouble than in the United States. Plants have been built recently in Japan in only five to six years, much more rapidly than before, and nuclear power is considered a major supply option