Neither Hype nor Complacency: Wmd Proliferation after the Cold War

Dr. Harald Müller is Director of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt. An earlier draft of this paper was prepared for the Aspen Strategy Group Workshop on the “Challenges of Nuclear and Biological Weapons Proliferation,” Aspen, Colorado, August 10-15, 1996. All nuclear weapons programs that concern us today date back to the time of the East-West conflict. The same applies to chemical and biological weapons programs; no new candidates have appeared since the mid-1980s, that is, since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev first entered the scene. However, developments in technology have made the production of these weapons easier. Concerning ballistic missiles, a few countries have increased the range of their missiles and developed a greater potential for accuracy using the universally availability Global Positioning System. This development is significant. However, the same countries have possessed ballistic missiles since before 1985, most of them of the old Soviet Scud-B version, or have had domestic ballistic missile programs for decades.