How many nuclear weapons do we need?
We’ve now had 10 weeks of my 12-week course at the City Lit in central London entitled “International Relations And World Conflict”. The latest session was devoted to nuclear disarmament.
Wikipedia provides an estimate of the number of nuclear weapons possessed the USA, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. You can check out the statistics here.
Although the total numbers are down from the time of the Cold War, there are still more than enough to wipe out humankind. Of course, it would be literally suicidal for any nuclear state to provoke such an all-out conflict, so why do we have nuclear weapons if in practicee they cannot be used?
The only rational argument is deterrence: if you think you might be attacked by a nuclear weapon, you want to be able to threaten a nuclear reaction that will deter the intended attacker from so acting. How many warheads does one need for such a deterrence?
One or two modern-sized nuclear weapons should take out the capital city of an aggressor and take the nation back to pre-industrial times. Let’s say that you need one or two more in case there are maintenance or renewal issues. So around five should do it.
But the UK alone has 160 active warheads. The USA has around 2,500 and Russia has more than 4,500. As Spock would say, it’s illogical.
December 7th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Isn’t it only illogical if you assume that you can fire all the ones you want to and that you can hit any target with the ones you have?
If you work on the principal that you won’t strike first then you have to build in for those that would be destroyed in by the enemy in the first strike and allow for a counterstrike.
You also need to assume that of those you launch a percentage will never reach the target. I would guess that can be quite a high percentage (think Scuds and Patiots during the Iraq war). You need to therefore launch enough to ensure your counterstrike arrives.
Furthermore, you need to be sure that you are capable of instant retaliation at any stage. This means you need your missile launch vehicles at varioius points around the world (submarines, missile bases, etc).
So although only a few hits against an enemy would be needed you need a fair few more to be sure.
This isn’t that I don’t think that one is too many etc, just that I can see how you can rationalise the need for more then needed to do the job (although 4,500 does seem a bit excessive).