The End of Overkill: Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy

by Benjamin H. Friedman, Christopher A. Preble, Matt Fay

President Obama has voiced his ambition to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to as few as 1,000 deployed warheads. Yet while the United States has cut the arsenal's size since the Cold War's end, its missions and composition have barely changed. Around 1,600 deployed nuclear warheads remain tied to a triad of system—bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Current plans call for modernizing all three systems, which could cost taxpayers over $100 billion. This new paper, The End of Overkill? Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, argues for basing U.S. nuclear weapons exclusively on submarines. It explains how the triad came from bureaucratic compromises, not strategic necessity, and shows how its burden on taxpayers is increasingly unjustified.

Genres: Politics

56 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013