The Cold War may be over, but you wouldn't know it from the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons still held by Russia and the United States. Arguing that the time has come to dispense with incremental approaches to arms control, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former head of the CIA and an experienced senior military commander, proposes a practical yet safe plan that would move the world into a new and secure era.

Turner carefully analyzes how many nuclear weapons are really needed to maintain our national security, regardless of how many weapons of mass destruction other nations may have.

He then offers a dramatic, unilateral American initiative - to place all of the world's nuclear warheads in "strategic escrow" whereby none would be ready for immediate use; to initiate a pledge of "no first-use" and call on other nations to do the same; and to build national defenses against nuclear attack when they become cost-effective.