In the beginning of his historic presidency, President Obama promised many things to the American people and the global community; one such promise was that he would endeavor to see the threat of nuclear weapons ended forever. On April 8^th, 2010, President Obama took a bold new step on that path. The conclusion of a new disarmament treaty with Russia marks the beginning of a far-reaching push by the Obama administration to halt and even reverse nuclear proliferation.

For years, nuclear weaponry has been one of the most critical existential threats to human survival, and since the conclusion of the Cold War, efforts have been made to reduce the potentially apocalyptic threat such immensely destructive weapons pose. Almost a decade ago, in 1991 the United States signed START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia, limiting the total number of operational nuclear warheads, ICBMS, and nuclear-capable submarines and bombers each country was allowed to possess. But the original START treaty expired on December 5^th, 2009, amidst a period of increased tension and worry within Russia-US relations. Now, however, in a diplomatic breakthrough, Presidents Obama and Medvedev have cooperated to draft and sign a new treaty- a literal “new START,” to renew and expand upon the pledges outlined in the previous treaty.

The result of a nearly year-long diplomatic process between the two countries, the New START has yet to be ratified by the US Congress and the Russian Republican Council, but it is expected to pass in both organizations thanks to a long history of bipartisan support for such arms-control legislation. New START will limit the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550, a number that represents a near two-thirds reduction from the terms of the original START, and almost a third lower than the more recent 2002 Moscow Treaty. Furthermore, the treaty pledges that both countries will limit the total number of delivery systems for such weapons (everything from missile silos to nuclear bombers to submarines) to 800 units, significantly less than before, and places additional restrictions on the conditions in which the US allows itself to launch nuclear weapons. Apart from the raw numbers and statistics however, the mere fact of the new treaty’s existence is indicative of a renewed and welcome cooperation between the United States and Russia. This comes as a heartening development, considering recent concerns over the state of the two countries’ relationship.

Beyond the New Start treaty, President Obama has announced plans for the US to host an unprecedented, global “nuclear summit” on Monday, April 12^th, drawing prominent leaders from over forty countries to discuss arms control and nuclear security. This momentous summit represents the single largest global meeting to be headed by the United States since 1945, with a particular emphasis on gaining tighter control over the world’s reserves of weapons-grade enriched uranium. As President Obama recognized in a recent statement, the nature of a nuclear threat has shifted in the past few years. The prospect of nuclear war between two superpowers is now considered slim to none. However, the real and rising threat is the possibility of nuclear terrorism, with a number of extremist organizations willing if not eager to get their hands on nuclear weapons and a worrying amount of weapons-grade material still either unaccounted for or poorly secured worldwide.

Many of the more powerful countries who will be involved in the summit, such as the United States, Russia, and India, have already suffered extensively from terror attacks, and as such they are all keenly aware of the potential devastation a terrorist with nuclear capabilities could inflict. Therefore, the summit is intended to minimize this risk by engendering international cooperation to crack down on the nuclear materials black market and place the world’s less well defended nuclear resources into more secure holding. Already, Chile has worked with the United States to store its unwanted reserves of highly-enriched uranium in better-equipped and better-defended American facilities. These measures and others like them will make it increasingly difficult, hopefully to the point of impossibility, for terrorists to get their hands on weapons-grade nuclear material.