The US and USSR signed the START nuclear arms treaty
On this day · 31 July 1991
In a Kremlin hall, two superpowers agreed to dismantle a third of the arsenals they had spent decades building.
On July 31, 1991, in St. Vladimir’s Hall at the Kremlin, US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START. After nearly a decade of talks, the two sides agreed to cut their deployed strategic nuclear forces by roughly a third.
The treaty capped each country at 6,000 accountable warheads and 1,600 delivery vehicles — the intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and heavy bombers that carried them. Crucially, it paired those limits with intrusive on-site inspections and data exchanges, the most demanding verification regime negotiated up to that point.
“The treaty that we sign today is a most complicated one,” Bush told the room.
History moved faster than diplomacy. The Soviet Union dissolved months later, scattering its arsenal across four new states, so START did not enter into force until December 1994. By full implementation, it had retired about 80 percent of the world’s strategic nuclear weapons.
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