Richard Schiffman - Obama’s plan for nuclear sanity
March 13, 2012 “Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon,” read the headline. This frontpage banner in the satirical weekly The Onion may not have gotten the number exactly right. The Obama administration reported in 2010 that the US possesses 5,113 warheads in the stockpile and an additional 4,500 retired, but not yet dismantled, making the grand total even higher than the spoofers had guessed.
While media pundits in the U.S. warn darkly of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, America itself is regarded as the main nuclear threat in much of the world today. The United States argues that it needs these weapons to deter attacks on itself and its allies, and that it would only use them to prevent or respond to such an attack. But people in other countries wonder why Americans need so many of them — secreted away in missile silos, on submarines and in bombers, computer-targeted to obliterate their cities at the turn of a key.
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