Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers ed. by Siegfried Hecker

Abstract

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet scientists worked tirelessly to invent new nuclear weapons and refine old ones, all in the name of nuclear deterrence, the promise to annihilate an enemy and lay waste to their cities and people. Starting with the 1988 Joint Verification Experiment, where Russian and U.S. scientists visited each other’s labs to determine parameters for the nuclear threshold treaty, the book covers lab director exchanges; warhead security enhancement; efforts to secure nuclear materials; the cleanup of residual nuclear materials in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan; the conversion of weapons scientists to non-military research; cooperative work on basic science; and methods of nuclear stockpile stewardship. [...]although “doomed to cooperate” makes for an evocative title, good will and joviality characterized almost the entire enterprise.