Summary
Mostly, advances in military science. Since the Cold War, progress in computational science, digital mapping, and sensor and guidance technologies have significantly enhanced the precision with which weapons can be aimed. [...] the massive reduction in U.S. and Russian deployed tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and in the average yields of these weapons (see Figure 1).3 When policymakers call for more nuclear weapons reductions and increased nuclear restraint, then, they are hardly pushing against historical or technological trends.
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Avoiding a Nuclear Crowd
IF CURRENT TRENDS continue, in a decade or less, the United Kingdom could find its nuclear forces eclipsed not only by those of Pakistan, but of Israel and India as well. Shortly thereafter, France could share the same fate. China, which has already amassed enough separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium to easily triple its current stockpile of roughly 300 deployed nuclear warheads, also is likely to increase its deployed numbers, quietly, during the coming years.1 Meanwhile, over 25 states have announced their desire to build a large nuclear reactor - a key aspect of most previous nuclear weapons programs - before 2030.
None of these trends should be welcome to those who favor the abolition of nuclear weapons. Indeed, unless these negative trends are restrained and reversed, nuclear weapons reductions in the U.S. and even Russia may not be enough to reduce continuing nuclear rivalries and could actually intensify them. To understand why, one need only review what is currently being proposed to reduce these nuclear threats.The road to zeroA DECADE AGO, an analysis of the challenges of transitioning to a world without nuclear weapons would be dismissed as purely academic. No longer. Making total disarmament the touchstone of U.S. nuclear policy is now actively promoted by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn - four of the most respected American names in security policy.2 Most of their proposals for reducing nuclear threats, moreover, received the backing of both presidential candidates in 2008 and, now, with President Obama's arms control pronouncements in April in Prague, they have become U.S. policy. These recommendations include getting the U.S. and Russia to make significant nuclear weapons reductions...See the full content of this document
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