No Nukes
How are the nuclear missiles in the U.S. stockpile tasked? Do we aim them still at Russia and Eastern Europe, or are they exclusively targeted at China? Do we have any preset for Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, France, or any other country with nuclear weapons technology? Is there really a need for new nukes?

With the end of the Cold War, many of us expected the “peace dividend” we never got to include at least a substantial reduction in the nuclear weapons ensiled around the country, maybe even the golden age when we wouldn’t have any at all and the atomic threat would largely have ended. With China, however, maintaining its stockpile, neither was going to happen right away, and the threat from various so-called rogue nations having increased, the excuse to keep ours continues. Of course, there’s little deterrent apparently, at least to terrorists, who very likely would detonate a radiologic device just about anywhere they could, if they could.

The threat today is more generally considered to be from unsecured radioactive material and weapons technology making its way into the hands of non-state actors more so than from the rogue nations, at least for the U.S. North Korea threatens Japan, Pakistan and India threaten each other, Israel threatens the Arab Middle East, who would themselves threaten Israel if they could develop the capacity to do so. France just blows off nukes to annoy everyone else, especially Greenpeace and people in the Pacific islands.

The space aliens aren’t coming anytime soon, it seems, and even with what we’ve got it would take some doing to address any asteroid collision problem, so what are the new weapons being proposed for? For use in “conventional” warfare. The purpose would be to attack and destroy “hardened” targets, deep underground bunkers and so forth, especially built to defy even the weightiest explosives we can presently deliver.

This is, presently, the way the world is addressing its problems, just prudent. Of course it would be better to improve the world, improve international relations, work for peace, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone at the head of any nation I can think of offhand who makes that the first priority. Yeah, maybe the Scandinavians, and various little countries around Europe. The world, however, is too small a place for such small, short-sighted thinking, and we’d be better off if we invested our efforts and our money in projects other than building a better bomb. Nationalism is pretty much an outmoded concept now, causing more problems than it’s fixing, as it’s usually done. Maybe we should be forging inclusive relationships outside geographic and political boundaries that aren’t purely trade-based or militarily opportunistic. That way there’d be less to be afraid of and fewer places we’d want to nuke.