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Nuclear Arms Cuts, Supported By 56% of Americans, Would Make the World Safer
Lasrick writes "Kingston Reif of the Nukes of Hazard blog writes about nuclear arms reductions are back in the news, thanks to President Obama's State of the Union address and now also a Gallup poll that shows 56% of Americans support U.S.-Russian reductions. From the Article: 'A recent report by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that senior Obama administration officials believe the United States can reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic warheads to between 1,000 and 1,100 without harming national security. Those numbers would put the total below levels called for by New START...' Congressional Republicans of course are against those cuts; Reif lays out why the cuts would make the U.S. and the world safer."
Do we even need a thousand nuclear warheads?
My understanding is that you are basically correct.
In-fact, one of the big points about the current anti-missile systems is that they do not have enough capacity to prevent strategic nuclear strikes from Russia or China. The goal is to make sure that they could always nuke us if they needed too. Which is a rather screwed up design feature; but it's understandable that we don't want to undermine their nuclear deterrence.
Fewer nuclear weapons but still enough to obliterate civilization can't possibly make the world less safe. What it will do is reduce the cost of maintaining a nuclear arsenal, reduce the number of potential accidents, and reduce the number of weapons which could fall into the hands of a rogue state or terrorist group.
Will NK or Iran "follow suit"? No. Iran has no nukes so can hardly reduce their arsenal. NK has a few dozen at best. Neither is in a position to reduce their arsenal to a mere 1,100 weapons.
The vast arsenals of the cold war were good for nothing except scaring the other guy (probably not even that). Why do we still have them?
Because the US and Russia possess two orders of magnitude more nuclear weapons than China possesses. Even after reduction each will individually hold more than four times what China currently holds.
that is absolutely a false statement, the USA does not possess enough warheads to kill every human on the planet, let alone every living thing. a thousand weapons could not even kill 80% of the people in a large country like Russia or China or India; too many cities, not enough bombs.
you watch too much Hollywood and have an exaggerated notion of what nuclear weapons can do
You might want to recheck that. The average nuclear warhead in the US arsenal is approximated to be 33,500 kilotons (slightly larger than the well known B41). For comparison, the nukes used in/on Japan were 15 and 21 kilotons. 33,500 kilotons is large enough to destroy/kill everything in a 55-60 mile diameter. It would take about 1000 of these to DIRECTLY kill everything in the United States. Factor in the indirect damage (nuclear poisoning, fallout, etc etc), and you could kill everyone in the United States with far far fewer. India (for example only), has 1/3rd the area of the United States. It would take probably 100 33.5 megaton nuclear bombs to kill everyone in an area equal to the size of India, and it would likely kill a couple hundred million of people not in that area.
That's completely false, most modern missile-based nukes are in the hundreds of kilotons, like 100-500 kt. 33.5 megatons is larger than the largest bomb we've ever had in service, the B53 at 9 megatons.
You mean the war summarized in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan ?
The one where the democratically elected Afghani government called for help from the Soviet Union *after* the US had covertly poured billions of dollars into training terrorist jihadi groups --- excuse me, "democracy loving freedom fighters" --- to rampage around the country? Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden really worked out great for the Free World --- Go Team America!