The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

On January 3, 1993, two and a half weeks before the end of Bush’s presidency, he and Boris Yeltsin signed the START II treaty, which prohibited land-based ICBMs from carrying more than one warhead apiece. The accord reversed the most destabilizing action in the history of the arms race. ICBMs loaded with MIRVs—multiple warheads, each of which could strike widely separated targets—were at once the most potent and the most vulnerable weapons in both sides’ arsenals. In a crisis, a desperate or risk-prone leader might be tempted to launch a first strike, if just to preempt the enemy from launching a first strike. In short, the very existence of MIRVs on ICBMs created a hair-trigger situation, in which both sides might feel an incentive to strike first. START II would remove that incentive.