There was recently an interesting piece in the Washington Post by Dana Priest titled “Aging U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Slated for Costly and Long-Delayed Modernization.” In summary, the article states that it is going to cost our nation somewhere in the neighborhood of $352 billion over the next 10 years to provide ongoing maintenance and provide for necessary upgrades to our nuclear arsenal of more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and accompanying delivery systems. Considering our current budget problems, this will be a difficult challenge to meet.

I was sad to read that many of the buildings at Los Alamos are currently in a very bad state of repair. Reading the article, it sounds like little has been done to upgrade the facility in the years since I worked there in the 1950s. The nuclear stockpile has been deteriorating for a long time — since I was at Los Alamos.

The issue of what to do about this situation is closely wrapped up with the issue of how many nuclear warheads we really need. This number is subject to treaty negotiations and the changing nature of our approach to warfighting, which is more tactical in nature and less strategic.

With the Cold War behind us, I personally believe we currently have far more nuclear warheads than we need. We don’t need more warheads, we need more effective warheads.

In my estimation, 1,000 nuclear warheads should be enough to take care of anything we might need them for. Reducing our arsenal to this level will save many billions of dollars in ongoing maintenance and upgrades — money that can be directed to other defense programs.

– Bob