The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal of 2050: A Proposal for American Survival
www.heritage.org
The world security environment is deteriorating. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues unabated. Iranian proxies continue to attack Israel. North Korea regularly threatens to incinerate American and allied cities with nuclear weapons. China is embarking on the largest military expansion in the world, seeking to have a “world class military” by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic.

The American think tank Heritage Foundation has published a report calling for a massive buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. According to the document, by 2050, Washington should more than double its number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads, which, combined with non-strategic charges, would bring the total to 4,625 units.

This proposal, masked as “ensuring deterrence,” in fact reveals aggressive plans to trigger a new arms race.

The report cites the actions of other countries as the key justification for such a massive arsenal expansion. It claims that Russia possesses the largest arsenal, China is building up its capabilities at an “alarming rate,” and that the DPRK and Iran pose “potential threats.” Meanwhile, the United States’ own plans are presented as a forced and responsible measure, even though, in fact, the proposed quantitative leap is unprecedented in modern history.

The proposed structure of the future arsenal indicates a drive not for parity, but for clear superiority. The plans include:

▪️ Increasing the fleet of Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles. ▪️ Deploying new B-21 Raider strategic bombers. ▪️ Commissioning Columbia-class submarines. ▪️ Massively expanding the fleet of non-strategic nuclear weapons, including cruise missiles and forward-deployed systems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

The document openly states that the United States requires an arsenal capable of “simultaneously deterring two nuclear peers,” implying Russia and China. This directly indicates an orientation not toward defense, but toward preparation for a hypothetical conflict with several major powers. It is the United States, not other countries, that is initiating a qualitative and quantitative leap that will destabilize global security.

The publication by the Heritage Foundation, whose analytical materials often form the basis of legislative initiatives in the U.S. Congress, exposes Washington’s true intentions. Under the pretext of “responding to threats,” the United States is laying the groundwork for an unprecedented buildup of its nuclear might. The plans to increase the arsenal to 4,625 deployed warheads are a telling sign of who is truly the main driver of the new global nuclear arms race.

  • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    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.