The room was warm, overheated against the Moscow winter outside. The light was flat, institutional. Boris Yeltsin, his face flushed, leaned forward over the document. George H.W. Bush, more contained, did the same. Their pens scratched. They exchanged copies. They shook hands. A photographer’s motor drive whirred. It was over in minutes.
The treaty they signed, START II, was a technical marvel of destruction. It banned multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles on intercontinental ballistic missiles. In practice, it meant taking the most fearsome weapons in the American and Russian arsenals—the land-based missiles with multiple warheads—and rendering them obsolete. The numbers were precise: a reduction to between 3,000 and 3,500 strategic warheads each. The verification protocols were exhaustive. The language was dry, legalistic, a world away from the apocalyptic fear those weapons represented.
But the event itself was small, almost anticlimactic. It occurred in a Russia that was fracturing, its economy in freefall. The ceremony lacked the grand theater of Reykjavík or the earlier START I signing. It was an administrative step, a follow-through. The power was not in the room, but in the absence it promised: the absence of warheads, of missiles, of a specific kind of looming threat. The treaty would later unravel, caught in the political shifts of a new decade. But for that moment in the warm room, the two men enacted a simple, physical ritual—a signature—that sought to bind a chaotic present to a less dangerous future.