The "Zero Option" was the name given to an American proposal for the withdrawal of all Soviet and United States intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. This term was subsequently expanded to describe the vision of eliminating all nuclear weapons everywhere.
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Reagan's initial proposal and reactions
U.S. President Ronald Reagan proposed this plan on 18 November 1981. He offered not to proceed with the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles – previously announced on 12 November 1979 and due to begin in 1983 – if the Soviet Union would remove its SS-4, SS-5 and SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe.
European and American anti-nuclear activists denounced the Zero Option as designed to be rejected so that the U.S. could deploy the new missiles without condemnation by critics there and abroad. Reagan's proposal came to widespread public attention especially in Germany, where the translated term Nullösung was chosen as Word of the Year 1981 by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache.
Following the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, however, nuclear arms control negotiations were resumed, and the Zero Option constituted the basis of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, agreed in principle in September 1987 and signed on 8 December that year.
Later similar disarmament concepts
Reagan's vision toward elimination of nuclear weapons went far beyond the goals of the INF treaty. On January 16, 1984, he delivered a speech saying:
"Our aim was and continues to be to eliminate an entire class of nuclear arms. Indeed, I support a zero option for all nuclear arms. As I've said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."The final total of Soviet and United States nuclear missiles, eliminated under the terms of the INF Treaty by the end of May 1991, was 2,692. The fulfilment of this multilateral agreement, which removed both intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear forces from Europe (the "Double-Zero" deal), was widely seen as a key step towards ending the Cold War.
21st Century Effort
The push for total nuclear weapons abolition was promoted again by U.S. President Barack Obama in a speech given on April 4, 2009, in Prague, where he announced...
Obama went on in that speech to state: