Cold War Veterans Blog

By Aida Akl Washington, D.C. 14 December 2006

Is the Post-Cold War World Safer?

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the beginning of the end to the Cold War, which, by most accounts, made the world safer. But some analysts say lingering Cold War legacies and new threats make today's world just as dangerous.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union brought the world to the brink of war. When the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, the United States responded with a naval blockade. And most experts say the standoff could have resulted in a nuclear showdown.

The 12-day Cuban Missile Crisis ended with the dismantling of the missiles and the recognition that neither power was willing to risk a nuclear disaster.

William Keller, Director of the Mathew B. Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh remembers that time. "When I grew up, we used to have our bomb shelters in our neighborhoods and had to be prepared - a whole generation, in fact, maybe two generations - for a war of all-against-all with a very unsafe environment," he says. "At one point [by the 1980s], we [i.e., the United States and the Soviet Union] had over 60,000 nuclear weapons at the ready. So the nuclear threat is greatly reduced. It has been replaced by smaller and, indeed, I think more manageable threats."

Nuclear Threat

Uranium conversion facility near Isfahan, Iran

Some people, Keller says, envision terrorists armed with nuclear weapons to be the greatest potential threat today. And some analysts worry that terrorists might succeed in stealing or smuggling nuclear material from unsecured sites across the globe. But others dismiss the notion, saying it is unlikely that terrorists would be able to acquire atomic bombs, let alone develop the capacity to deliver them in the near future.

But Gordon Clark of the Maryland-based advocacy group, Peace Action, argues that the spread of nuclear weapons technology to states like North Korea and possibly Iran, and the changing nature of conflict, make for a more dangerous world...........complete article