Curated playlist
Arms control treaties
- START IIOn the 3rd of January 1993, START II was signed by US president George H. W. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin. The treaty had a single goal: to ban a class of nuclear weapons that both nations had spent decades building. Called…
- Outer Space TreatyThe Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the 27th of January 1967, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union all signing on the same day. That date fell squarely in the middle of the space race, just months…
- START ISTART I, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was signed on the 31st of July 1991 by the leaders of two nations that had spent four decades pointing tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at each other. When its final implementation…
- Strategic Arms Limitation TalksThe Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in Helsinki in November 1969, at a moment when the United States already held 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 656 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Two nuclear superpowers sat…
- Washington Naval TreatyOn the 6th of February 1922, five of the world's most powerful nations put their signatures to a document that would reshape naval warfare for two decades. The Washington Naval Treaty, also known as the Five-Power Treaty, bound the British…
- Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to GermanyOn the 1st of August 1945, the Potsdam Agreement established provisional terms for governing Germany after World War II. This accord created an Oder, Neisse line that awarded most of Germany's former eastern provinces to Poland and the…
- Anglo-German Naval AgreementPart V of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed severe limitations on Germany's naval forces. The treaty allowed no submarines, no naval aviation, and only six obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships. German naval forces were restricted to…
- New STARTNew START, signed on the 8th of April 2010 in Prague, was the most significant nuclear arms reduction agreement between the United States and Russia in a generation. At the moment the treaty entered into force on the 5th of February 2011,…
- Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear WeaponsThe Non-Proliferation Treaty, known almost universally as the NPT, opened for signature in 1968 with a single overriding fear driving its creation: that within two decades, as many as thirty nuclear-armed nations could exist on earth. That…
- Treaty of VersaillesThe Treaty of Versailles was signed on the 28th of June 1919, exactly five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that had ignited the war it was meant to end. The hall chosen for the signing was…
- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces TreatyThe Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ended, formally, on the 4th of August 2025, when Russia announced it would no longer abide by its terms. For a treaty that had already been dead as a functioning agreement since 2019, the…
- Antarctic Treaty SystemThe Antarctic Treaty System governs an entire continent where no human being has ever been born. On the 1st of December 1959, twelve nations signed an agreement in Washington that would freeze territorial ambitions, ban military…
- Partial Nuclear Test Ban TreatyOn the 5th of August 1963, three governments gathered in Moscow to sign a document that had taken nearly two decades of argument, scientific dispute, and near-catastrophe to produce. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty forbade nuclear…