Thomas Neff’s idea rid the world of a third of its nuclear warheads

In October 1991, at a meeting of American and Russian officials on nuclear disarmament, he asked himself much the same question. The first arms-control agreement, START-1, had just been signed. The Russians, amid the chaos of the collapsing Soviet Union, were protesting that they were broke and could not afford to dismantle their warheads. The Americans did not trust them to do so. Since the Russians could not even pay the wages of workers in their nuclear plants, the nightmare now was that some starving workers might go rogue, selling nuclear material to North Korea or Iran. The Americans wanted to monitor the dismantling but obviously, Dr Neff thought, the Russians would not open their plants to a lot of spies. The two sides were talking past each other. What good could that do?