Obama and the Bomb: New START, Russia and the Politics of Post-Cold War Arms Control

This book is the first study of how President Barack Obama and his administration used the negotiation and ratification of an arms control treaty, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), as a vehicle for advancing one of the president’s primary foreign policy objectives, a reset of US relations with Russia in the early years of his first term of office. It is a study of the administration’s efforts to move from a president’s strategic vision to defining that vision as a policy priority and ultimately, successfully negotiating what the president deemed the first and most important element of the reset agenda.