¹ United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, at https://disarmament.unoda.org/wmd/nuclear/npt/ (accessed March 1, 2025).

² Wikipedia: Strategic Arms Limitations Talks, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Arms_Limitation_Talks (accessed March 1, 2025).

³ Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II, at https://armscontrolcenter.org/strategic-arms-limitation-treaty-ii/ (accessed March 1, 2025).

⁴ Susan Colbourn and Mathias Haeussler, “Once More, with Feeling: Transatlantic Relations in the Reagan Years” in Jonathan R. Hunt and Simon Miles, eds., The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Ithaca, NY, 2021), 125.

⁵ Simon Miles, Engaging the Evil Empire. Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Ithaca, 2020), 82.

⁶ Jeffrey Boutwell, “Politics and the Peace Movement in West Germany,” International Security 7, no. 4 (Spring 1983): 72. See also: Andreas Umland, “Germany’s Russia Policy in Light of the Ukraine Conflict: Interdependence Theory and Ostpolitik,” Orbis 66, no. 1 (2022): 78–94.

⁷ According to Miles, the “Kremlin and its allies relied on assets within the Western European peace movement to agitate against INF. Soviet policy makers took pride in their ‘huge propaganda campaign,’ but as the KGB admitted, Europeans had yet to ‘get it into their heads’ that INF would make them ‘hostages.’” See: Miles, Engaging the Evil Empire, 79, also 176, n232 and 177, n233.

⁸ Gerhard Wettig, “The Last Soviet Offensive in the Cold War: Emergence and Development of the Campaign against NATO Euromissiles, 1979–1983,” Cold War History 9, no. 1 (February 2009): 91–92. See also: Becker-Schaum, Christoph. “The Institutional Organization of the Peace Movement,” in Christoph Becker-Schaum, Phillip Gassert, Martin Klimke, Wilfried Mausbach, and Marianne Zepp, eds., The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (New York, 2016), 154–172; both cited in Freeman, 259, n114.

⁹ Wikipedia: Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty (accessed March 1, 2025).

¹⁰ Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer, “KAL and the Superpowers: An International Argument.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 3 (August 1988): 271–295.

¹¹ Interestingly, Freeman makes essentially the same mistake in her discussion of Gorbachev’s speech two weeks after the explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986. She claims that the accident “showed [to] the Soviet leader the chaos and suffering that would result from a nuclear war” (Freeman, 175). That was not Gorbachev’s motivation at all. Because the reactor was housed in a flimsy industrial building, its radioactive impact was more devastating than if any western-style reactor had exploded. Facing an insurmountable public relations disaster at home and in world opinion, Gorbachev desperately needed something to say to the Soviet public. Simply the fact of his nationally televised speech was historic: keep in mind that this was the first national media appearance by a General Secretary in Russia since 1941, when Stalin went on the radio to announce Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, signaling the USSR’s entrance into World War II. To quote a very American expression, all that Gorbachev achieved was “putting lipstick on a pig.”

¹² Or at least four times the US level. See: Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth. “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter, 2000–2001): 23. Even today, Russia’s GDP does not approach that of Texas.

¹³ I believe that Freeman misunderstands this situation. As we wrote nearly thirty years ago, “The government defended its helplessness before the devastating radiation release from the explosion by insisting that the accident ‘proved’ the necessity for avoiding nuclear war, the proportions of which would dwarf the consequences of a mere industrial accident.” See: Michael K. Launer and Marilyn J. Young, “Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Nuclear Safety,” in David R. Marples and Marilyn J. Young, eds., Nuclear Energy and Security in the Former Soviet Union (Boulder, 1977), 51.

¹⁴ Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York, 2019). See also: Rosalie Bertell, “Behind the Cover-Up: Assessing Conservatively the Full Chernobyl Death Toll” Pacific Geologist (Winter 2006): 15–18, 39–40. For a review of Manual for Survival, see: Michael K. Launer, “Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History” in David Cratis Williams, Marilyn J. Young, and Michael K. Launer, eds., The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse—Volume One: The Path from Disaster toward Russian “Democracy” (Brookline, MA, 2021), 393–409.

¹⁵ It did not, however, prevent Gorbachev from sending OMON troops into Latvia and Lithuania in January/February1991 to quell independence demonstrations there. See: Wikipedia—The Barricades, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barricades (accessed March 1, 2025). See also: Wikipedia—January Events, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events (accessed March 1, 2025).

¹⁶ Read: lasers, space lasers—not the “Israeli” kind, but even the serious projects recently tackled by the military have proven to be ineffective, and the research has been scrapped.

¹⁷ Unfortunately for Reagan, most of the scientific community had its doubts regarding the technical feasibility of the concept. Even proponents, such as George Keyworth—the president’s science advisor—“judged that the hardware is at least 20 years away.” See: Wayne Biddle, “‘Star-Wars’ Defense Has a Future,” The New York Times, March 25, 1984, 22. In 1987, a year after Reykjavik, the American Physical Society concluded that the technologies being considered were decades away from ready use, and at least another decade of research was required to know whether such a system was even possible. See Wikipedia: Strategic Defense Initiative, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative (accessed March 1, 2025). Soon thereafter, all defense department research funding was redirected to other projects.

¹⁸ During the last two years of Gorbachev’s time in office, GDP dropped by 12% and 13%, respectively—nearly 25% overall. See Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization,” 21, 32.

¹⁹ Steven Pifer describes the Ukrainian economy as “fragile”—certainly a generous appraisal from an experienced diplomat. See his The Eagle and the Trident: U.S.-Ukraine Relations in Turbulent Times (Washington, DC, 2017).

²⁰ Murray Feshbach, Secret Cities, Glasnost and Global Environmental Threats (Washington, DC, Paper for the Council for Soviet and East European Research, no date), 3.

²¹ Pifer, Eagle and Trident, 176.

²² Mariana Budjeryn repeated this statistic in a March 15, 2024, presentation for the Carnegie Institute, entitled “Should Ukraine Have Kept Nuclear Weapons? Deconstructing the Decision to Disarm,” which is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e8vLmqoEFY (accessed March 7, 2025).

²³ Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Fact Sheet: The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, at https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-the-nunn-lugar-cooperative-threat-reduction-program-2/ (accessed March 1, 2025).

²⁴ For more than 30 years (1987–2018) I was fortunate enough to participate in these events as a technical translator and conference interpreter.

²⁵ “The Evolution of Cooperative Threat Reduction.” Congressional Research Service, Report № 43143, November 23, 2015, at https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=43143&orderBy=Relevance (accessed March 6, 2025).

²⁶ Pifer, Eagle & Trident, 112.

²⁷ For a list of over one thousand such projects, see European Commission; Energy, Climate change, Environment; Nuclear Safety Cooperation, at: https://nuclear-safety-cooperation.ec.europa.eu/contracts_en (accessed March 1, 2025).

²⁸ Regarding Kazakhstan, see: Togzhan Kassenova, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford, 2022).

²⁹ Pifer, Eagle & Trident, 211.

³⁰ The journalist in question was Heorhiy Gongadze. See: Pifer, Eagle and Trident, 199–201.

³¹ Pifer, Eagle & Trident, 165.

³² Maria Snegovaya, “Smena rezhima v Rossii? Demokraticheskii tranzit, kotorogo ne bylo,” Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i kul′tury, no. 1–2 (2023). An English translation titled “Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began” is available in Journal of Democracy, 34, no. 3 (July 2023): 105–18.

³³ Alexander I. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, 1980), 26 (cited in James Goldgeier, “NATO Enlargement and the Problem of Value Complexity,” Journal of Cold War Studies 22, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 149–50.

³⁴ James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC, 1999), 158.