I have discussed nuclear weapons in many previous posts as well as nuclear treaties aimed at disarmament and non-proliferation. The United States has not been focused on developing new nuclear weapons or adding to the number of weapons in our stockpile during the first term of President Obama. Obama has been espousing nuclear disarmament and the total elimination of nuclear weapons on a global scale since he entered politics. During his first term in office, he brought up the subject of nuclear disarmament in speeches both here and abroad.
In 2010, Obama convinced the Senate to ratify a new strategic arms limitation treaty with the Russians. The new treaty set the cap on the number of allowed deployed warheads to thirty percent below the cap at that time. This new cap would be set at around fifteen hundred deployed warheads.
Now, in his second term, he has been working quietly to gain the support of the U.S. military to cut the number of operational U.S. nuclear warhead to around one thousand which would be the lowest U.S. nuclear arsenal in decades. His new initiative also calls for additional cuts to warheads if the Russian will agree. Obama has been responsible for cutting the total number of warheads in the U.S. arsenal from over fifty two hundred to about forty seven hundred. At the height of the Cold War in 1961, the U.S. had over twenty five thousand warheads.
Since there is no real way to defend against a nuclear attack, the U.S. has adopted a strategy of deterrence based on the idea that if anyone attacked us, we could retaliate and devastate them. This is known as mutually assured destruction. Of course, it all depends on the U.S. having enough warheads left after a massive nuclear attack to successfully retaliate. A trio of warhead delivery systems consisting of ICBMs in silos, nuclear bombs on U.S. bombers and Trident nuclear missiles on U.S. submarines is intended to guarantee this retaliatory capability.
Everyone agrees that a few thousand warheads are more than enough to preserve the U.S. ability to respond to a nuclear attack. However, there are some who question whether an arsenal of a thousand or less is enough for retaliation. They claim that if an enemy thinks that they can destroy enough of our nuclear capacity in a first strike, they can escape serious retaliation. They are especially concerned that if we disarm completely or even down to a few hundred warheads, then an enemy might think that they can escape any retaliation if they attack us.
It has been estimated that even a nuclear exchange of a few hundred warheads would be enough to cause a nuclear winter that would doom billions of people and effectively end our civilization. The infrastructure and the economy of the world is so intertwined and integrated globally that nuclear destruction of even a few major U.S. cities would have a major impact on the rest of the world including the attacker. I don’t really believe that the other major nuclear powers are so suicidal that they would believe they could survive any nuclear attack on the U.S. without suffering terrible damage to their own economy, environment and citizenry.
U.S.S. Michigan, Ohio class submarine carrying Trident missiles:
