Word: nuclearism
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...seem absurd, but war planners in both countries, though ostensibly no longer adversaries, care very much about even the smallest incremental adjustments that would alter nuclear parity. And so not just the tone of negotiations but their goal must be set just right. Zimmerman and other arms-control experts argue that a good deal for a new treaty would be to keep the counting and robust verification system of the START treaty in place, but with a moderate goal of reducing the number of weapons. Obama himself has indicated that he favors a modest first step. At the Carnegie International...
Barack Obama has declared a goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. But moving toward zero is going to be difficult, even with the U.S. President's having agreed with his Russian counterpart to restart nuclear-disarmament negotiations, and specifically to try to replace the 1992 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The goal of any arms treaty would seem simple enough: reduce the number of weapons. But the dirty little secret about nuclear weapons is that the fewer of them you have, the more difficult it becomes to get rid of them. Big arsenals are inherently more stable than...
That's why the first step will likely be a modest one. Traditional deterrence theory holds that a country should keep as many nuclear weapons as it would need in an absolute worst-case scenario, one in which it had to destroy the war-fighting capacity of multiple adversaries. The Russians have made clear that they want a START replacement to limit delivery systems (intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and bombers), but American war planners may resist drastic cuts in that area because of concern that the U.S. might lose the ability to deter multiple enemies at once. "China...
...both sides will want to avoid the Cold War dynamic of large, permanent delegations gathering in Geneva and facing off across a large table, pencils sharpened." But, he says, they must also acknowledge that "they have legitimate concerns regarding the size, posture and security of the other side's nuclear arsenals." The most likely sticking point will be agreeing on how to count nuclear weapons: specifically, whether to count all the weapons each country could potentially use or only the ones that are ready at the time of negotiations...
...original START treaty opted for the former approach, setting absolute limits of 6,000 warheads and 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bombers per side. But the most recent nuclear-arms-control agreement, the 2002 "Moscow Treaty," settled on the more nebulous measure of "operationally deployed warheads" (of which both sides are allowed 2,200). That way of counting, which the Russian government and some American arms-control advocates now oppose, measures only the number of nuclear weapons on the tips of long-range missiles or on bomber bases. Most long-range missiles are capable...