Nuclear Armament/Disarmament - The Dog Wags the Tail

Presented at a lab meeting on 16 April 2009.

On the 5th of April in Prague Barak Obama made a historic speech highlighting the increased global risk of nuclear weapons. He stated the only safeguard was disarmament. According to the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) there were an estimated 20,190 warheads in existence at the end of 2002. This is down from a peek of 65,056 warheads at the end of 1986. Figure 1 displays the total nuclear arsenal of the United States (US) and the Soviet Union/Russia (SU) by year from 1945 till 2002.


Figure 1. Cold war superpower nuclear arsenals by year.

In order to examine how the two cold war superpowers acquired their arsenals and how they dismantle them lag analyses were performed. The annual change in arsenal size between the two superpowers were not correlated, nor was the Soviet change with the American change lagged from one year to five year. However, the American changes were correlated with the Soviet change lagged from one year to four years (rho(57)=0.85;p<0.01, rho(56)=0.62;p<0.01, rho(55)=0.43;p<0.05, rho(54)=0.28;p<0.05 respectively). Therefore, it appears that Mr. Obama may have the power to reduce both American and Russian nuclear arsenal by taking the first step.


Figure 2. Change in nuclear arsenal size by year.