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Nuclear Arms Cuts, Supported By 56% of Americans, Would Make the World Safer

Posted by Unknown on from the cold-war-never-ended dept.

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?

2 of 615 comments (clear)

  1. Re:US/Russia? but no China? by xstonedogx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Incorrect by riker1384 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.