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In February 2015, President François Hollande stressed the need for a nuclear deterrent in "a dangerous world". He also detailed the French deterrent as "fewer than 300" nuclear warheads, three sets of 16 submarine-launched ballistic missiles and 54 medium-range air-to-surface missiles and urged other states to show similar transparency. [60]
The Cuban Missile Crisis (October–November 1962) brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before. [194] The aftermath led to efforts in the nuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations, although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961. [J]
China developed its first nuclear weapon in 1964; its nuclear stockpile increased until the early 1980s, when it stabilized at between 200 and 260. [1] India became a nuclear power in 1974, while Pakistan developed its first nuclear weapon in the 1980s. [1] [21] India and Pakistan currently have around one hundred nuclear weapons each. [19]
Countries build nuclear triads to eliminate an enemy's ability to destroy a nation's nuclear forces in a first-strike attack, which preserves their own ability to launch a second strike and therefore increases their nuclear deterrence. [2] [3] [4] Only four countries are known to have the nuclear triad: the United States, Russia, India, and China.
Russia and the United States are the world's biggest nuclear powers, holding about 88% of the world's nuclear weapons. [7] The Soviet Union ratified the Geneva Protocol—prohibiting the use of biological and chemical weapons in interstate conflicts—on April 5, 1928, with reservations that were later dropped on January 18, 2001. [8]
A nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) is defined by the United Nations as an agreement that a group of states has freely established by treaty or convention that bans the development, manufacturing, control, possession, testing, stationing or transporting of nuclear weapons in a given area, that has mechanisms of verification and control to enforce its obligations, and that is recognized as such ...
Former U.S. officials Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn (aka 'The Gang of Four' on nuclear deterrence) [71] proposed in January 2007 that the United States rededicate itself to the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, concluding: "We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on ...
Cold War – period of political and military tension that occurred after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc (the United States, its NATO allies and others) and powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact). Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 1947–1991 is common.