The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union prompted international concern over the safety and security of the Soviet arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In legislation sponsored by Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, the U.S. Congress approved a program to assist Soviet weapons dismantlement.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program has since authorized more than $1.5 billion for a wide array of weapons destruction, demilitarization, nuclear security, and nonproliferation activities in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union.

Dismantling the Cold War is the first systematic assessment of the CTR program. It provides both insiders' views of how the complex policy initiative was conceived and "in-country" views of how it was carried out. A frank assessment of what U.S.-NIS cooperation has and has not accomplished, the volume offers programmatic, political, fiscal, organizational, and technical suggestions to help U.S. and NIS policymakers cope with the world's paramount proliferation threat.