The Heritage Foundation is destroying this country. Pretty much has already.

This is horrifying. Another gigantic step in stealing the future from our descendants.

Look how war is evolving in Ukraine. The future of warfare lies in decentralized swarms of little drones, not the power to eradicate entire cities in one shot. In a world war, China would flex it's manufacturing superiority and pivot towards small, precision drones that would overwhelm and destabilize any country's ability to even control a nuclear arsenal. Nukes serve as a vengeance panic button to assert that if we can't win, no life will.

The heritage foundation is scared of the US being overtaken by China because all they understand is power. They will not cede the hegemony to China, as the loss of unchallenged power (in their reckoning) is tantamount to inevitable apocalypse. They want the apocalyptic panic button.

I never understood why any country needed more than like...20 nukes.

If someone is willing to risk you firing one nuke at them, I don't think another thousand will detur them.

The world security environment is deteriorating.

In part thanks to the Heritage Foundation.

Just, why? Why? We already have more nukes than anyone except Russia, and even that is just a number at this point. There is no deterrence gain for adding more. None. Even accepting deterrence arguments as valid, we already have far in excess of what's needed. At most, we need to swap some old cores.

This has been studied by several military experts over the years:

What was the "right" number? Given the subjective nature of the process, there can be no single figure. However, over the years, a number of knowledgeable individuals have tried to quantify a minimum nuclear requirement and it is worth considering the results of some of their efforts.

In 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations, estimated that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence. This figure took into account the fact that some weapons would not work and that some would be destroyed in a Soviet attack (Burke believed that just 232 warheads were required to destroy the Soviet Union). At the time Burke made this estimate, the U.S. arsenal already held six times as many warheads.

Several years later, in 1960, General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that "a few hundred reliable and accurate missiles" (armed with a few hundred warheads) and supplemented by a small number of bombers was adequate to deter the Soviet Union. Yet by this time the United States had some 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads.

In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" calculated that 400 "equivalent megatons" (megatons weighted to take into account the varying blast effects from warheads of different yields) would be enough to achieve Mutual Assured Destruction and destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society. At that time, the U.S. arsenal contained 17,000 equivalent megatons, or 17 billion tons of TNT equivalent.

Even if we accept that we have to have these infernal things, we're at least an order of magnitude beyond what we actually need.

This is pure giveaway to nuclear military contractors.

Surely this will lower the price of eggs.

Are we incapable of completely glassing literally every nuclear armed nation's population centers? If not then it's just an expensive and dangerous alternative to diplomacy. If so, it's just an expensive, dangerous, and unhelpful alternative to therapy.

I like how they can't even name China as making more nukes, just "enhanced capabilities" because it's well known that China doesn't mass produce nukes just like every other nuclear power like UK, France, India. Pakistan, etc.

by 2050, Washington should more than double its number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads

First contact day is April 5, 2063, 13 years later.

The increase in non-strategic nuclear weapons (regional or battlefield) is an especially scary capability that we intentionally backed away from. Just no.

The concept of needing a massive buildup to counter emerging nuclear powers is just laughable. Do they even look at what they’re writing?

I have to admit that having some number of hypersonic missiles with nuclear warheads may be a good idea

But the missed their opportunity with hypersonic missiles. As those become available worldwide, they increase the chances of an unblockable preemptive attack occurring with no chance for reaction. We don’t need more nuclear weapons (and fewer would be preferable) but they need to be survivable enough to be a valid deterrent