Comment on Max Boot, Commentary » Blog Archive: New START Treaty: Much Ado About Nothing

Commentary » Blog Archive » New START Treaty: Much Ado About Nothing

Also posted to Max Boot's Facebook.

What is the argument for reducing our strategic arsenal in the first place? Possibly it made sense to use them as bargaining chips to reduce the Soviet arsenal during the Cold War but as you point out that is the past. Why shouldn't we be increasing our stockpile back to 6,000 warheads? How would we be less safe or worse off if we did so? Exactly how does our restraint reduce the threat that Russia, China, the wannabe Caliphate or all their proxies and agents pose to us?

Right now Ahmadinejad believes that the US would not use nuclear weapons on him. That belief is strengthened by his ability to calculate that with fewer than 2000 warheads the expenditure of up to 100 of them in digging out his dispersed program might be considered to costly. If we changed that calculus then the deterrence value of each additional warhead increases.