The overwhelming bulk of nuclear weapons have always been held by the United States and the Soviet Union-and then Russia-and reductions between them far outweigh small increases elsewhere. The number of nuclear weapons in the world has been going down for decades. Some scholars argue, for example, that having a robust nuclear capability constantly benefits the United States by swaying non-nuclear contests in favor of the Americans, although I believe all of these arguments fail to account for the costs of making or implying threats.Īnother possible cause of the dampening of a revolutionary rethinking of nuclear weapons is that nuclear weapons create their own reality, one that is difficult to escape. Yet, with the end of the Cold War, the US was, in fact, left with this powerful tool, and it is tempting to look for ways to exploit a tool that is at hand. Even so, if Russia and the United States woke up tomorrow with no nuclear weapons, it is unlikely they would immediately start to rebuild the Cold War-inspired arsenals that they have today. One explanation could be that nuclear weapons are flexible and can be applied to new uses. There may be multiple explanations for this dampened response. Obviously, this is not to say that US thinking about nuclear weapons has not changed at all since the Cold War, only that the dramatic changes in the political and military environment seem not to be reflected by equally dynamic changes in thinking about the future of the triad. Now that the nuclear world has been turned on its head since the end of the Cold War, current plans are to simply replace the old triad with a new one.Ī cynic might be forgiven for imagining that the future direction of the nuclear arsenal depends more on momentum than careful analysis. The US “triad” of bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) owes its origins as much to rivalry between the Air Force and Navy as to careful military planning, but the triad is a structure that became sacrosanct during the Cold War. Although the weapons are not in quite as much of an aging crisis as it is sometimes portrayed, they are indeed getting old and will eventually need to be retired and, most assume, replaced. The long-range, or strategic, nuclear weapons that make up the core of America’s nuclear arsenal are all inherited from the Cold War.
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