Public sentiment is overwhelmingly negative, reflecting deep concerns over the growing number of countries acquiring nuclear weapons and the implications for global security. Commenters emphasize skepticism and anxiety regarding national motives and ethical dilemmas in discussions about nuclear policies and AI in warfare, pointing to perceived hypocrisy, frustrations with political motivations, and fears of escalated conflict. Calls for responsible, ethical dialogue and urgent reform within international nuclear policies are prevalent.

United States

Pakistan

China

Russia

Iran

[deleted]

With the Trump administration pulling back from and signaling European allies they need to take care of their own defense (as leaked conversation within the administration appear to state), what are the odds of nuclear proliferation in Europe?

Do you think conversations such as German Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz in March saying he would like talks with France and Britain about sharing their nuclear weapons is the start of a larger trend? If so, does that trend lead to nuclear proliferation or simply a more diversified nuclear umbrella with France &amp; the UK taking up the slack?

dieyoufool3

Given how China is racing with nuclear warhead production to reach parity with the US and Russia, what are the chances that India will someday try to seek parity with China too?

SolRon25

Good morning, Ankit. Thank you for doing this. 

I used to listen to you on the Diplomat's Asa Geopolitics podcast, though I haven't kept up with it for a few years. I always appreciated your commentary and insight into the issues in Asia because they felt like they were less Washington-centric than a lot of other commentary. 

One of the big issues that we're currently facing is the failure of arms control and a rapid increase nuclear proliferation (Jeffrey Lewis and Aaron Stein recently joked about changing the tag of their podcast to "the arms race podcast"). While there are a number of individual countries that might seek their own nuclear weapons capabilities, do you think that current nuclear states like the UK or France might consider offering to replace the US's nuclear umbrella for other European countries with their own? 

On the other side of the world, there has been talk in South Korea by some fringier elements of starting a program to become at least a threshold nuclear country. With their changing political circumstances (possible disruption of their alliance with the US and the probable incoming Lee Jae-myung presidency now that Yoon's impeachment has been confirmed), do you think that developing a nuclear weapons program is likely or even politically possible? 

And do you think of the idea that Trump's policies of America First might actually reduce the need for certain countries to develop nuclear weapons because they'll begin to rebalance their politics to align with the other nuclear powers (Russia and China) and see them less as a threat? 

Will most countries try to develop their own production capabilities, or do you think that there are some countries that might simply try to buy nuclear weapons for existing nuclear powers? 

Finally, there are some countries that are obvious choices for developing nuclear weapons programs, with Poland at the top of the list. What are your wild card picks for countries that will try to get them? 

Thanks again for doing this.

SlyReference

Hello Ankit, I love your podcast on War on The Rocks. I have a question about Canada, what are your thoughts on Canada least consider procuring SSBNs, or some sort in the South Korean approach, where they are armed with conventional SLBMs but with the implicit capability to get nuclear warheads should global proliferation (break down of the NPT) make it possible.

ponter83

Which countries present the greatest proliferation risk today? 

Is there any talk of new international proliferation cooperation along the lines of Saudi-Pakistan or Israel-South Africa? 

Sentinel hot (or cold) takes? 

In today's world, how can we make the case that proliferation even among allies is detrimental to the national interest?

RedditorsAreAssss

How did the CIA assess North Korea's nuclear ambitions in the early stages, and what intelligence gaps may have contributed to the failure to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear capabilities?

What could the United States have done to prevent Pakistan's AQ Khan from transferring sensitive nuclear technology to North Korea?

Strongbow85

How concerned should the international community be about the potential for North Korea to share nuclear technology with other nations or non-state actors?

How would the world be different if it were exactly the same but no nuclear weapons?

GregJamesDahlen

Given North Korea's advancing missile capabilities, how effective are current defense systems (such as THAAD and Aegis) when it comes to intercepting potential attacks? How can the United States improve their defensive capabilities?

What impact does North Korea's nuclear development have on global non-proliferation? What challenges does it present to international arms control agreements?

Armegeddon to me means the end of civilization.

Do you see a "final" war that ends civilization coming? If so, what nations would likely be best equipped or best situated to survive this? What nations would not be?

Unlucky_Sherbert_468

If the nuclear genie gets out of the bottle (use of a nuclear weapon somewhere in the world post WW2), what do you feel what would be the next realistic policy step, a rush to try to put the genie back in (restore use taboo) or outline when nuclear weapons are acceptable?

-spartacus-

Do you think Europe has any other choice but nuclear proliferation to level the massive disparity between them and Russia (and also USA)?   

Also, when push comes to shove, how much can we rely on France/UK retaliating for Russian *tactical* nuclear use on e.g Polish soil?

westerlund126

Hey care to elaborate what this boos is all about?

Happy_Comfortable

Hi /r/geopolitics! I’m Ankit Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I’m also author of “The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon,” a new book surveying the current global nuclear landscape. Please join me on April 4 between 9AM and 10PM ET for an AMA here on /r/geopolitics. I’ll be glad to talk about my work, career, and the new book—and anything else nuclear weapons-related that may be on your minds.

You can follow me on BlueSky at https://bsky.app/profile/nktpnd.bsky.social or on X at https://x.com/nktpnd.

A bit about Ankit:

Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research interests include nuclear strategy, escalation, missiles and missile defense, space security, and U.S. alliances. He is the author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon (Polity, 2025), Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Risks (Carnegie, 2023), and Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (Hurst/Oxford, 2020). Panda is co-editor of New Approaches to Verifying and Monitoring North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal (Carnegie, 2021).

Panda has consulted for the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and his analysis has been sought by U.S. Strategic Command, Space Command, and Indo-Pacific Command. Panda is among the most highly cited experts worldwide on North Korean nuclear capabilities. He has testified on matters related to South Korea and Japan before the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Panda has also testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. Before joining Carnegie, Panda was an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and a journalist covering international security.

Panda is a frequent expert commentator in print and broadcast media around the world on nuclear policy and defense matters. His work has appeared in or been featured by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Economist, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the South China Morning Post, Politico, and the National Interest. Panda has also published in scholarly journals, including Survival, the Washington Quarterly, and India Review, and has contributed to the IISS Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment and Strategic Survey. He is editor-at-large at the Diplomat, where he hosts the Asia Geopolitics podcast, and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks, where he hosts Thinking the Unthinkable With Ankit Panda, a podcast on nuclear matters.

AnkitPanda_AMA

There has been a great hype in the last decade, about "hypersonic" vehicles, touted as an "unstoppable" weapon by many countries propagandists.

Compared to a classic Ballistic Reentry Vehicle (RV), does a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) bring significant advantages (besides the obvious one of flying lower and taking more time to be detected by ground-based defense systems), or do the disadvantages (heat signature traceable over the whole trajectory, larger costs, etc...) offset the advantages? This assuming that both RV's and HGV's have more or less equivalent capabilities for maneuvering in their terminal trajectory phase.

In short: "hypersonic" missiles? Real gamechanger or just hype?

moir57

what does the future hold for world and india as specifically since US is paving a new wave of foriegn and trade policies  
and what would you predict may happen to the asian subcontinet in the current trend.

roohnair

Can we hear your thoughts about pakistani nukes? I remember one of my professors saying "If reality was realistic, pakistan would have collapsed by now". How would the collapse of a nuclear state effect the world stage, and is it possible to see non-state actors armed with nuclear weapons.

YinuS_WinneR

why the "new" nuclear age?

do any politicians have a sadistic side and enjoy the fear they can create with their nuclear weapons? what are politicians' emotions around nuclear weapons?

Do you think that many publicized fears about nuclear winter or nuclear autumn (such as this: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-pakistan-nuclear-war-would-bring-global-famine/) are overblown? How difficult would it be for USA/Russia/China/Europe to rebuild themselves after a significant global exchange, should people even hope for them to rebuild, or just plan to get on a ship to South American, assuming they are able to survive that catastrophe, in your opinion?

Edit: Also, if there was some sort of limited nuclear exhange (lets say Russia starts using tactical nukes on Poland), do you think cities of the major superpowers will empty out?

ryleg

Check out the B61-13 modernization program for the US. 
Then check out the addition of hundreds of PLA ICBM silos in China. 
And then check out the new Russian R37 air launched nuclear weapon. 
We’re living today in an era of nuclear expansion and modernization.

nohandsnick

Nuclear weapons are relatively cheap compared to airplanes for example. Even to level a quarter of a small village, you will need 100 or so mk84s jdams , now do the money math with the guidance kits , aircraft missions , maintenance, crews etc... And likely it will be multiple missions, not simultaneous. You pointed out all the wrong reasons. The main reason is the taboo aspect , radiological consequences, and the way our doctrines work. We could be living in a very different reality if the US also dropped nukes in Korea and Vietnam , we would view them as an acceptable thing the politicians use once in a decade. It's all a matter of perspective.  Look how small gaza is . It took the izraelis more than a year and an obscene amount of bombs , demolition operations and buldozers to level it at like 50%. A 360kt b61 costs around 30 mil , and a few will do that instanteniously.

BeyondGeometry

This is completely wrong, as evidenced by all the current and projected action regarding new nations attempting to develop their own weapons, and current nuclear powers modernizing and expanding their arsenals.

There are significant indications that the global stockpile of nuclear weapons is growing and will eventually be spreading, reversing a previous trend of reduction that was slowly progressing since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Here's a breakdown of the actual situation:

Several current nuclear-armed states are actively modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals, most notablythe United States, China, and Russia. This includes developing new types of weapons, improving existing ones, and potentially increasing the overall number of warheads. 

Geopolitical tensions and deteriorating relations between nuclear powers has lead to a greater emphasis on nuclear deterrence and modernization. There are also major concerns about the survivability of nuclear forces. Countries are starting to consider increasing their arsenals to ensure they can withstand a potential first strike and still retaliate.

More recent breakdowns or weakenings of arms control agreements are contributing factors as well, such as the expiration or potential collapse of treaties like New START. That could remove constraints some nations have on nuclear weapons production. 

Modernization is also a big issue. The Arms Control Association estimates that the United States plans to spend up to $1.5 trillion over 30 years to overhaul its nuclear arsenal. This includes developing new delivery systems (submarines, missiles, bombers), modernizing warheads, and upgrading infrastructure. And as they do, the rest of the nuclear armed world will have no choice but to do the same or risk falling behind.

Then we have proliferation to think about. While the number of states with nuclear weapons has remained relatively stable, there are major concerns about potential proliferation risks. With much of the world watching Ukraine and seeing what really happens when a nuclear armed state invades a non-nuclear power, policy is being changed. This is why Poland is currently considering a military nuclear weapons program. Some countries, like North Korea, have continued to advance their nuclear weapons programs. Iran is doing the same in their race the achieve parity with Israel. The erosion of arms control treaties and the rise of new security threats will only incentivize other countries to pursue nuclear weapons. 

As there is increased nuclear proliferation, that will significantly destabilize the international security environment and increase the risk of nuclear war.
It will also lead to a more complex and unpredictable geopolitical landscape. The general consensus is that in the near future we will see the use and eventual normalization of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons to accomplish aims that aggressors or defenders are unable to complete by conventional means. 

So, while the overall number of nuclear warheads may be lower now than during the height of the Cold War, the trend of reducing nuclear arsenals has already started reversing. As the world is entering a new age with the burgeoning throd world war we are about to wage, the concerns about normalization, new proliferation, and the erosion of arms control efforts all contribute to a growing sense of unease regarding the future of nuclear weapons, and the increasing likelihood of their use in even smaller, regional wars.

Vegetaman916

Deterrence has always been the ONLY role of nuclear weapons. You can’t authorize the use of these weapons to battlefield commanders considering the political repercussions. I wouldn’t count in their numbers decreasing. China wants parity with the U.S. and Russia. Europe needs parity with Russia. We are in a new phase of the nuclear arms race.

NarwhalOk95

neither Japanese cities nuked at the end of WW2 were totally destroyed - that's including the weak &amp; flammable construction involved &gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; one of the reasons why nukes weren't considered for use against Germany ....

the centerpoint outward were leveled - but both cities were back operating within weeks - the city trolley systems were back in operation and used in recovery within a couple of days .....

IlliniWarrior6

&gt; But there is an instructive precedent for Washington’s use of coercion to bring states to the arms control negotiating table. In 1983, Washington deployed nuclear-tipped Pershing II missiles in West Germany and ground-launched cruise missiles in Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands. Rather than prompting escalation, this aggressive move compelled Moscow to engage in diplomacy that led to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated all intermediate-range forces from Europe.

Really not a fan of this optimistic interpretation of history although I can certainly see why it's popular in some circles. Unsurprisingly the part where Soviets broke off negotiations instead of caving when Americans, unsatisfied with terms being discussed, began deploying Pershing IIs in Europe gets left out.

The idea that SDI was some sort of decisive factor in browbeating Soviets to arms control discussions is also [way overblown](https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs25podvig.pdf).

vistandsforwaifu

I fully support China's push to be as nuclear armed as US on a per capita level, primarily using land based silos.

wangpeihao7

I always love when American strategists think they can out-compete China in industrial capacity. On one hand they complain about **overcapacity** but assume this industrial overcapacity doesn't percolate to defence/arms/missiles sphere. China has been consistently spending less on defence (as percentage of govt expenditure or GDP) than US. They also have much more headroom if there is a breakout of arms race.

straightdge

Has the US ever actually shared nuclear weapons with its allies? Even UK and France had to independently develop nuclear weapons. I don't think the author actually mean to help Japan/Korea to obtain independent nuclear capability, merely station US nuclear weapons in those countries.

In practice that doesn't really add any additional capability since the US already have SSBNs that are more survivable than any missiles stationed on land in Asia. In practice forward deployment of nuclear weapons have little military value. If the US really wants to launch a nuclear attack on China, any forward deployed nuclear weapons have to be coordinated with launches from SSBNs and other nuclear platforms. There is no point in a small scale nuclear attack that does not significantly damage Chinese 2nd strike capabilities since China would be able to inflict equal damage to the US in retaliation.

As long as the US maintain the same sized global nuclear arsenal, the specific of where they are deployed are largely of political value. At the end of the day, there is nothing the US can really do to prevent China from becoming a nuclear peer. Moving nuclear weapons around on the map doesn't change this.

jz187

The problems with these types of analyses is that it stops just short of prognosticating on what China would do in retaliation.

What's stopping them from arming Iran (and other *worse* actors) if the US follows through with sharing weapons with Japan and South Korea?

ratbearpig

If 1000 nukes are dangerous to the world, what's 5000?

jerpear

&gt;Washington Should Threaten to Share Weapons With Japan and South Korea

Yo Japan and SK, wanna become legitimate targets for strategic level payloads of nuclear warheads once we kick shit off with China? It’ll be fun! Promise.

Diligent_Bit3336

everything china did that prevents the west from lording over them and every non-western nation is dangerous.

  
Damn right.

CureLegend

The essence of journalism 

Fill any empty head with shit and be told it's nutritious

Round_Club_4967

Would China ultimately accept a nuclear South Korea and Japan? I'm inclined to think they would. Taking over Korea and Japan isn't in their plans, I believe. It would bother the US more than China, because this would make them less dependent on the US military for deterrence.

praqueviver

If we greyed out the names of all the countries involved why would any power ever want to distribute nukes among its allies. It seems like basic theory suggests if you can help it you want to be the only one in your alliance to control the nuclear arsenal.

Maximilianne

In reverse of what the author say, US should reduce their nuclear  stock pile to 500 and China will definite start the discussion. But of course, I don't think US will do that.

Low_M_H

One thing about a war is that your enemy doesn't simply wait around for you to launch all your missiles and bombs at them. They'll attack your missile launch sites, hunt your submarines, shoot down your bombers, try to shoot down your missiles (though that's very hard).

In particular, both the USA and USSR wanted enough nuclear weapons to be able to respond to a "first strike" by the other. So, if one attacked first, destroyed a load of subs, launch sites, airbases, etc. there would still be enough nuclear weapons left to ensure their destruction.

That's the theory, at least. How much this *actually* drove planning and procurement decisions is another question. For example, in the US fears of a "missile gap" were used politically, even though intelligence agencies, and most likely politicians knew this wasn't the case. Another thing that can happen is failure to take into account the type of weapons - for example, a load of big, but bomber dropped bombs might have a bigger bang than ICBMs, but in practice are less effective.

tiredstars

When missiles were all land-based there was a problem. If the other guy shot first you'd lose 98% of your missiles, how could you shoot back in that case? By having 50x more missiles! Even if you managed a near-perfect first strike you'd still get nuked back.

WraithCadmus

The crazy idea is that you need enough missiles to reach all targets AFTER your enemy shoots most of your missiles out of the sky on their way to their target. So, if you have 500 important targets, you better have 10,000 missiles. This way, there is no way for your enemy to ever think they can defend themselves from an attack. And, you are safe from your enemy, because they would be crazy to ever attack you!

RickKassidy

The very short version: because 60s and 70s era missiles maintained by enlisted soldiers weren’t expected to be insanely reliable or accurate, and lots of bombers were expected to get shot down. 

The idea was that even if the other guy got 95% of your stuff, you still had so much stuff that enough would get through that he couldn’t win.

The longer version:

Nuclear deterrence is dominated by three concepts:

1. Offense is defense, defense is offense
2. Weapons that kill weapons are bad, weapons that kill people are good 
3. Mutually assured destruction is not just desirable, it’s necessary

Basically, it goes like this:

- Cities are large, easy to hit, impossible to defend targets
- Which means that sure, I can kill your cities, but I won’t because you can kill mine too
- I WANT you to be able to kill my cities, because it’s a check on my own generals getting dumb ideas
- BUT if you start building weapons that are intended to kill my *weapons,* instead of my *cities,* that’s bad. Because it gives you the ability to strike without being struck back
- And it doesn’t really matter what kind of weapons those are - a hyper-accurate bunker-busting missile that kills my missiles in the ground before they launch is indistinguishable from orbital lasers that shoot missiles down mid-launch, or a super-silent submarine that kills missile subs before they launch. *All of them achieve the same end*
- So: so long as you’re building bombs and missiles to kill cities, I’m happy. They’re expensive, hard to maintain, and have never been tested in a live fire situation, so I’m comfortable knowing you won’t use them except as a last-ditch defensive measure, ie bombs are already falling on your soil
- But if you’re building space lasers and killer subs I’m worried, because it means you’re trying to build a way to strike first without follow-on consequences to your cities
- And of course everything is super secret, so I can never KNOW you don’t have a working first-strike capacity
- So what I do is I have enough bombs and missiles to overload even a very effective unknown first-strike tool
- If I have 7,000 bombs, that means that even if 50% of my stocks are duds that don’t work, and even if you have a space laser that is 95% effective - both unrealistically high estimates, reality is probably more like a 1-5% failure rate at most and a 50-60% shoot-down rate at most - that means 175 bombs with 10-100 times the yield of Hiroshima are falling on your cities
- There is no country capable of building nukes that won’t have well over 75% of its population concentrated in wherever those 175 bombs will fall

It’s the ultimate fail-safe.

whistleridge

You build a bomb and then they build a bomb, so you need to have more bombs, which means they also need to have more bombs. 

So then, you figure, you need better bombs, so you build new better bombs, which means they must also build new better bombs, and thus, you also need bombs that are better still. 

This continues, but remember, bombs have a shelf life, and not necessarily a short one. So whilst you’ve both been building more and more, better and better bombs, your old ones have been sat there (happily) not being used. Stockpiles grow. 

Lots of “we’re reducing our stockpiles” acts by nuclear powers have just been them getting rid of old stocks because they’ve been superseded by far more horrific ones.

FlummoxedFlumage

One thing that's important to remember is that while we think of nukes as world ending city killers, during the cold war the plan was to basically nuke everything.  See 20 tanks attacking?  Nuke um.  Found a supply depot? Nuke it.  Enemy ships spotted?  Oh that's a nuking.  
Let's not forget we were designing nuclear artillery shells, nuclear torpedoes, hell there was even a nuclear air defense system that tried to shoot down nukes with nukes.  
All those different systems really push up the numbers.

Reyals140

1 Nuke will not destroy the world. I think people severely overestimate the power of a nuclear bomb 🤦. Yes they are more powerful than other bombs but they aren't going to crack the Earth in half or knock it off it's axis. 

To actually cripple or destroy a nation, you need a lot of bombs... even Nukes.

1. They *couldn't* "destroy the world".  That's basically just anti-war/anti-nuclear fiction. At peak (1985), the world had about 63,600 nuclear warheads.  At an average of 100kt per, the "light damage" area would be about a total of about 16 million sq kilometers.  That's enough to damage the entirety of Russia and nowhere else.  Once.  And that's with an idealized impact pattern to maximize area.  Realistically, even a full blown exchange would be less than that, and it's certainly nowhere near enough to destroy the *entire world,* and certainly not 100x over.  Yes, many, many people would have been killed, but hardly everyone.
2. Nearly every scenario involved a lot of weapons that would be lost in the initial strike from an enemy.  War planners largely assumed that roughly half of their arsenals would never be launched.
3. Many of those weapons weren't deployed simultaneously.  Nuclear weapons need maintenance/repair/refurbishment, which would remove some substantial percentage of those warheads from use at any given time. 
4. At "peak nuke" there were substantial concerns (especially in the USSR) that missile defense systems would take out a lot of warheads in flight. Being able to overwhelm those systems was a critical part of their nuclear strategy. (And promises not to deploy such systems got them to substantially back down on the number of warheads they had).

HEre's a US map of what a full scale nuclear exchange might look like:

[https://preview.redd.it/uwazks0y5ov91.jpg?width=960&amp;crop=smart&amp;auto=webp&amp;s=2ef572236f460e16598d69789ae29f82adcce4c7](https://preview.redd.it/uwazks0y5ov91.jpg?width=960&amp;crop=smart&amp;auto=webp&amp;s=2ef572236f460e16598d69789ae29f82adcce4c7)

&amp;#x200B;

A tremendous number of warheads are concentrated on the missile fields of Montana, ND, and they Wyoming/Colorado/Nebraska border area.  Major cities, military targets, and some infrastructure targets are also going to be hit.  But even here, you can see that vast areas are unaffected, or have only minor effects. Those areas with missile fields are going to be the ones where we "make the rubble bounce", and major cities are obviously fucked.  

And again, that's all at "peak warhead".  Today, the world has some 12K nuclear weapons, and the potential of damage is reduced proportionally.

JustSomeGuy556

USA: we have a nuke.

USSR: yeah, well we have 2 nukes.

USA: well that won't do.  *builds two more* now we have three.

USSR: while you were building those two, we built FOUR.

And so on and so forth.  It was all about having a bigger stick than the other guy, only the stick was nukes.

SniperFrogDX

Cold war era was a lot of scare tactics and espionage.  One of the scare tactics was if you attack me, I respond and attack you with a nuke.  Seeing as how we had a nuke (observed during WW2), Russia built 5.  I. Response the US built 10 and so on.

This led to a lot of posturing and covert operations to see if the other side was lying about their arsenal.  It also came back with the acronym MAD (mutually assured destruction) which essentially state that if either side started a nuclear strike the other side would respond in kind elimination of both power

Big_lt

They definitely didn't have enough nuke to literally destroy the world in the sense of kill every living thing on land. Although you hear that alot. Quick googling says there was about 60 000 nukes at the height of the cold war, earth has a land area of 60 million square miles so that's one nuke for every 1000 square miles. If every nuke was the size of the tsar Bomba that would cover it but most nukes are much smaller, less than a megatonne. But i don't have the data to make an estimate of what percentage of the earth could be destroyed.

Hepheastus

The USA did it to bankrupt the USSR - in order to keep up the USSR was spending 20% of its GDP to keep up with the USA in military spending. It was one of many factors that led to the collapse of the USSR.

Hand-Of-Vecna

Wait til you read about the mineshaft gap! Hello? Dimitri?

KnownFluxGiven

Let's talk about the US first. 

The big "ramp up" to a huge number of nukes started in the 1950s and early 1960s, but required infrastructure to be put into place in the late 1940s to make that possible. To give you a sense of what kind of upgrades were required, keep in mind that the Manhattan Project's World War II production rate was planned to be, _at best_, about 3.5 nukes per month once it got running at its full capacity. (In practice it was never quite that high because of issues that showed up at Hanford in late 1945.) By comparison, at the height of production, in 1960, the US stockpile was growing by over 500 nukes per month (so almost 18 per _day_), and that was during a time in which they were also _decommissioning_ and replacing old nukes, so the actual production rate was even higher. 

There were several reasons for this "ramp up." The main one is that the military essentially set a production requirement for as many nukes as could be made. In principle, what was supposed to happen was that the military was supposed to look at how many nukes it felt were militarily necessary, and then the production would work backwards from this requirement. In reality, the military would ask, "how many could you make?" and then just ask for that many. Why'd they do this? There were "strategic" and "non-strategic" reasons for this. 

The "non-strategic" reasons, which arguably were more important as motivators, were things like the belief that "more nukes = more security" as a simple ideological position (very common by the 1950s/1960s), a belief that if the US had "more" then it would be "more secure" (without any sense of the diminishing returns that inevitably accompanied this), and mundane political issues like the Navy not wanting to be out-done by the Air Force (interforce rivalry was a huge issue), or a sense that more nukes = more bases = larger organizations = better for your careers (another major issue; an expanded and funded "mission" is what makes individual units within bureaucracies strong, and because of the other issues, this was allowed to be essentially unchecked for many years). Additionally, until the early 1960s, the nuclear war plans of the different services were not coordinated, and also not controlled by the White House, and so each of them were essentially planning their own requirements and armageddons. 

There was also strong public support (esp. by Congress and the rest of the "military-industrial-complex" that Eisenhower warned about) for the "more nukes = more security" idea, and it made it so that even projects that were half-assed or arguably extremely dangerous were given the "OK" during periods (esp. early 1950s and late 1950s) where public anxiety was high (Eisenhower's "military-industrial-complex" speech was, in part, a warning that even a decorated war-hero President was unable to control this endless military expansion under conditions like the "Sputnik shock"). 

The "strategic" reasons are the official reasons that would be given for such an expansion, couched in military-strategic terms. As a historian I would again caution against taking these at total face-value; the "non-strategic" reasons likely played as much or even more of an actual role in the expansions, with the "strategic" reasons being the after-the-fact rationalizations used to make them seem palatable. The strategic reasons were:

a) A perception, esp. in the 1950s and early 1960s, that the US was "falling behind" in the arms race with the Soviet Union. This was dramatically untrue, but the idea was widely held until the US got better intelligence on Soviet deployments. To give you an example of what I mean by "dramatically untrue," prior to the CORONA satellite program the US Air Force intelligence estimates believed that the Soviets had hundreds, if not thousands, of ICBMs in the early 1960s. The CIA had more modest estimates but they were still in the hundreds. In reality the Soviets had more like _three_ ICBMs deployed at that time, and the US had 20-to-1 to 5-to-1 advantages depending on what systems one cared about during that time. 

b) Tactical nuclear weapons. This gets lost in "raw warhead counts" but [a huge part of that initial expansion were tactical nuclear weapons](https://imgur.com/irbZrEt) — "small" nuclear weapons that would be used as "battlefield" weapons against military targets. These included nuclear artillery, air-to-air nuclear missiles meant to take out bombers, ship-to-ship missiles, nuclear depth charges, nuclear landmines, and relatively low-yield bombs or missiles that could be dropped on or launched at troops, tanks, etc. I put "small" and "low-yield" in quotation marks because some of these were objectively pretty powerful weapons that, if they were aimed at cities, would do as much damage as some "strategic" weapons. For example, it was not uncommon for "tactical" weapon to have yields as high or higher than the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the designation "tactical" is more about the nature of the intended target than the size of the weapon. As you can see from that graph, as a category this really took off in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The justification for these weapons were that the US and NATO conventional forces were inadequate in size compared to the conventional militaries of the Warsaw Pact and People's Republic of China, and "battlefield" nukes would be "force multipliers" that would give them an advantage. This evolved into a slightly different strategy, which was to increase the "credibility" that the US would use nuclear weapons by adding the possibility of "limited nuclear war." (If the only option for nukes is "hundreds of millions die and national suicide," then their use looks impossible. But if you can say, "hey, we could go toe to toe with you and maybe _not_ go all the way into the abyss... so don't try anything!," then that can be perhaps a more credible threat.)

c) Targeting strategies that demanded high levels of confidence in destruction during periods in which reliability and accuracy were uncertain. This is one of the things that most people don't understand about nuclear targeting — they assume, "one target, one nuke," but even before the age of nuclear plenty that was not the way they were thought about. The actual approach is to say, "given uncertainties about the reliability of the weapon systems, how accurate they are, and the possibility of enemy action destroying some of them either before they were launched or while they were en route, how many nukes of a given yield would I need to aim at a given target to have a 95% confidence that it would be totally destroyed (where 'destroyed' is defined by X amount of blast pressure being put on it)?" Which, especially given the accuracy of early weapon systems, ends up adding up to deploying nukes with huge yields to offset inaccuracy (it's hard to "miss" with megatons than kilotons), as well as redundant targeting. So in 1961, for example, Secretary of Defense McNamara asked the military planners what the current "requirement" would be if they wanted to destroy Hiroshima, and the answer was that it would take 3 nuclear weapons of 80 kilotons each to hit their definitions of "destroyed" at the time. As that example illustrates, this approach can lead to situations of intense "overkill" (Hiroshima was, in fact, destroyed with one 15 kiloton bomb), because they are really statistical in nature. 

d) Not all weapons were actually deployed at the same time. If you look at warhead counts, one finds that, for example, the US had some 12,000 strategic nuclear weapons in the mid 1960s. However if you actually look at how many were fielded on weapons systems, ready-to-launch, the number of "force loadings" was more like 6,000 nukes. Still plenty! But that means that for every nuke in the field, there was a nuke that was not. Why not? Because systems got deactivated and it took time to disassemble and recycle the components, and because some were kept in "reserve" to swap out with ones in the "field" as was felt was necessary. 

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restricteddata

MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction.  If you're going to turn me into a glass floored self lighting parking lot, I'm doing the same to you.

HumpieDouglas

Both sides were operating under a strategy of mutually ensured destruction. If you have a small arsenal then the enemy may conceivably get it in their minds that they could launch a preemptive strike which takes out your own nuclear capabilities and then leaves you exposed to nuclear attack. By building an arsenal so large that it could never be destroyed the enemy is less likely to ever try to engage you because it is virtually guaranteed they get destroyed in the process.

generalmandrake

&gt; What’s the point of being able to destroy the world 100 times over? 

Nobody ever had enough nukes to destroy the world even once.

&gt; Why did the USA and USSR make so many nukes?

Because they were very imprecise, so most would not hit the targets, and enemy action could destroy a lot of nukes before they were launched. Easiest way to deal with it was to just build a lot extra.

All these strategic answers when the real answer is simply to steal moneys from the peoples

DJ_Catfart

Recent reports indicate a concerning trend in global nuclear armament, with nine nuclear-armed states enhancing their arsenals.

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