By Vagif Guseinov, Director, Institute of Strategic Studies and Analysis, Editor-in-chief, the Vestnik Analitiki Bulletin.

The current stage of international security development has a peculiar feature: the nature of the threats that mankind currently faces. The threat of the world’s leading powers coming into military collision is slowly receding while threats common to all humanity are gaining ground. Therefore, the potential role of US - Russia cooperation in maintaining international security is expanding. However this potential is far from being used in full.

One possible exception is nuclear and other WMD nonproliferation, where both the USA and Russia, with their massive nuclear stockpiles and arsenals of delivery vehicles, bear the greatest burden of responsibility. With Russia and America signing the new START, a short-term result of uneasy compromises, we have proof of how both countries take this mission seriously. We should bear in mind that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is not just crucial but is in fact the only way of deterring large-scale aggression.

Especially since from Russia’s perspective, the conditions contained in these agreements mean that Russia pays a much higher price for those compromises reached, than do her American counterparts. (It is difficult to give an accurate assessment of the reciprocal concessions made for the sake of agreeing START, since much of the detail has yet to be disclosed).

Inadequate though the recently signed Russian-American START-3 may be, it is an absolutely necessary step towards the success of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference this May. The NPT is one of the few multilateral arms control agreements wherein the positions of America and Russia coincide on practically all the key points of the nonproliferation agenda and which has seen the closest cooperation of all 40 years of the NPT. This treaty is, thus far, the only multilateral agreement on nuclear disarmament signed by the Nuclear Five. Hopefully, Russian-American cooperation heralds the restriction and reduction of the other nuclear powers’ deadly arsenals.

Today, however, it is not the Nuclear Five’s policy that poses the major danger (at present, the chance of war between them is close to nil). The most dangerous problelms are those of nuclear nonproliferation that remain unsolved, and the chance that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of irresponsible regimes or terrorist organizations. Nowadays, it has to be acknowledged, there is a greater probability that nuclear weapons will be used, compared with the Cold War period, even though it might be in a smaller scale than it was expected in those years. The NPT regime, established nearly half a century ago (it was signed in 1968 and came into force in 1970), is somewhat inadequate to the contemporary reality and, obviously, needs to be modernized. It is impossible to do so without cooperation between Russia and the USA.

President Barack Оbama’s may urge the world to get rid of all nuclear arsenals, but this is hardly an achievable goal for the near future. Russia, in any case, is not prepared to go all the way to the full nuclear zero, nor is China, nor are America’s European allies: Great Britain and France. Even in America, many think this idea is utopian.

Still, the US President’s radical drive is a telling example of the fact that Cold-War style political thinking is weathering and loosing ground. Regrettably mankind has drawn no lessons from the bloody history of the 20th, which saw three world wars. Indeed, referring to three world wars is no slip of the tongue: the Cold War deserves to be regarded a world war that miraculously failed to develop into a ‘hot stage’ (it suffices to recall the crises of Berlin in 1961 Berlin, or the Caribbean in 1962). And WW3 did not begin with Winston Churchill's speech in Fulton, as Soviet history had it, but with the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These bombings had no military objective (the outcome of the war with Japan had already been decided), but rather served to demonstrate America’s military might to the Soviet leadership. That was a challenge the Soviets rose to: they had no other way out. Then everything escalated: ideological and military confrontation, the convulsive nuclear arms race and the stockpiling of mountains of conventional arms on both sides. We ought to be thankful to the leaders of the USSR and USA who attempted to turn away from that fatal course and signed the NPT in 1968. It not just slowed down the global nuclear race, but also played a positive role in the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and, eventually, in putting an end to the Cold War.

That is why Obama’s idea of the ‘nuclear zero’, although there is only a slim chance of it being implemented, still serves to improve the international climate and remove some of the obstacles to cooperation in maintaining global security.

I think that America’s new nuclear strategy, which has drawn criticism both from those who support nuclear disarmament and those who oppose it, still gives a positive impetus to solve the nuclear nonproliferation problem. Of course, it should not be forgotten that at present America’s ability to solve strategic problems using conventional arms by far exceeds that of other countries, including Russia.