One of the perennial questions of the nuclear age is ‘How Much is Enough?’ In the late 1950’s, Admiral Arleigh Burke and the U.S. Navy argued that the American arsenal could be much smaller than the massive one that had been created over the course of the decade. The Navy position, which came to be known as one of ‘minimum’ or ‘finite’ deterrence, never prevailed during the Cold War; the American nuclear arsenal during the Cold War contained over 30,000 warheads by the late 1960’s. In his thoughtful and provocative new book, Tom Nichols argues that the time for the adoption of a minimum deterrent posture is now. Despite the large reductions in the American arsenal since the end of the Cold War, Nichols argues that further reductions in the size of that arsenal are long overdue. In his view, the 1550 warheads provided for by the ‘New Start’ treaty can and should be reduced much further.
Tag: nuclear weapons
Article Review 25 on “Why States Won’t Give Nuclear Weapons to Terrorists.”
In 2010 U.S. President Barack Obama stated that nuclear terrorism was “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term”.[1] The events of September 11, 2001 demonstrated the real risk of catastrophic terrorism. It also exacerbated existing fears that groups such as Al-Qaeda would be willing to detonate a nuclear device either on U.S. territory or American valuables abroad. It is one thing to hijack a plane and crash it into a building. It is quite another challenge to obtain a nuclear weapon or the materials needed to assemble a nuclear bomb. Unlike ‘conventional’ arms which proliferate much more easily in the international system, nuclear weapons are much harder to assemble or obtain; a terrorist group would need a state’s assistance to do this. This has raised the issue of terrorism as a technique – that a state might resort to nuclear attack by proxy against the United States and its allies in order to avoid attribution.[2]
