Few national decisions are more important than those relating to nuclear weapons. In the US, such debates have been intense. Often, the executive and the legislature made bad decisions, prompted by political defensiveness and the false promise of security residing in these fearsome weapons. In nuclear matters, one bad decision typically leads to more. Corrective action in the US did not begin until the early '70s, picking up considerable momentum in the late '80s. The biggest breakthroughs required transforming events in the Soviet Union. For the last decade, the US and Russia have each been dismantling between 1,500 and 2,000 warheads annually. Both countries have a long way to go to correct past mistakes.