A Timeline of Nuclear Disarmament

The Reagan Years
The U.S. arsenal remained at a constant level for most of the 1980s, as President Ronald Reagan cast the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposal to use ground- and space-based systems to protect the U.S. from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative, dubbed "Star Wars," was criticized as unrealistic and a threat to destabilize the status quo. In this photo, a poster purporting to lay out the true size of the U.S.S.R.'s collection of SS-20s (a type of ICBM) is displayed during testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

• Turning Russian Nukes into U.S. Energy