As a lifelong diplomat whose last foreign post was as Britain’s ambassador to the Kremlin in the Soviet Union’s final years, Rodric Braithwaite acquired decades of insight into UK and US policy on nuclear weapons. This includes the memoirs of physicists involved in the Soviet nuclear programme, many of which have not yet been translated into English. There was equivalence on the western and Soviet sides and Braithwaite is absolutely fair in describing this. Earlier in the same chapter he mentions that Canada, South Africa, Argentina and Brazil were capable of acquiring the skills necessary to develop their own nuclear weapons but renounced them. The Kremlin’s 1982 declaration that it was adopting a strategy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons mirrored the western peace movement’s position.

Source: The Guardian December 30, 2017 07:30 UTC