Arms control treaties: The rules of the game - International Herald Tribune

Arms control treaties: The rules of the game - International Herald Tribune: "President George W. Bush, and his aides, could hardly wait to get rid of all those tiresome arms-control treaties when they took office.
They tore up the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty to make way for a still largely pie-in-the-sky missile defense system. They opposed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and never made a serious effort to win a ban on the production of fissile material (the core of a nuclear weapon).
Bush grudgingly signed his one and only arms-reduction treaty with the Russians in 2002. That means that today - 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands ready to launch within minutes.
The bad news, of course, didn't stop there."