Nuclear freeze

The nuclear freeze was a proposed agreement between the world's nuclear powers, primarily the United States and the then-Soviet Union, to freeze all production of new nuclear arms and to leave levels of nuclear armanent where they currently were. However, the difference in the systems between the two nations meant that while the proposal was widely publicized and debated in the United States, there is little evidence that this occurred within the Soviet Union. It should be noted that this proposal was primarily one of Western activists, and was never actually a direct part of governmental negotiations between the two major nuclear powers.

The nuclear arms race between the two superpowers had gone on almost unabated since the Americans had developed the first atomic (fission) weapons in the 1940s, later matched by the Soviets, with both sides also developing hydrogen (fusion) weapons in the 1950s. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements of the 1970s had provided limits and quotas on the amount of these weapons, but adherence to such limits were generally regarded as unverifiable by conservatives on both sides and the limits were generally considered to be unrealistically high by liberals.

The "nuclear freeze" was proposed as an alternative. The movement really began to gain traction as an issue in the early 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, a known "hawk" and "peace through strength" advocate, as United States President in 1980. Reagan stated that he had no desire for a freeze, but rather a verifiable bilateral reduction, in nuclear arms. He also showed little interest in meeting with the aging Soviet leaders. When Leonid Brezhnev, whom Reagan had never met, died in November, 1982, Reagan felt justified, believing that anything that he would or could have negotiated with Breznhev would have died with him. He likewise never met with Breznhev's two immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, who were also elderly and in frail health like Breznhev, each dying within about a year after taking office. During this time, the frezze issue was being pressed in the United States. It almost became a litmus test issue, conservatives almost invariably opposed to the idea and liberals in favor of it.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader, Reagan met with him and began work along with him on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was eventually ratified by both nations' legislative bodies and techically remains in force today, although it is considered by most strategic experts highly doubtful that the post-Soviet Russian miltary is actually capable of operating and sucessfully lanuching anything like the number of ballistic missiles and other strategic weapons allowed it under the treaty. As such is assumed to be the case, strategic nuclear weapons, although still deployed in large numbers by the United States, are of somewhat less concern than previously, and the "nuclear freeze" has thus become something of a dead issue, with a more immediate concern being how better to keep the ex-Soviet nuclear stockpile and other sources of potentially fissionable and/or fusionable materials out of the hands of terrorists.