The marginal increase of additional security/nuke is so low at those numbers as to be irrelevant, especially in a unipolar world where the US utterly dominates in an economic and military sense.

As others have said, I’d rather see most of the money maintaining these nukes go towards debt retirement and advances in nuclear tech or missile defense.

plenty of mobile delivery systems for our nukes (subs, for example), and a huge country that makes getting to all or most of our nukes impossible.

There’s absolutely no fear that we will suddenly lose our nuclear capabilities.

The development of our missile defense tech is still proceeding apace — what Obama cancelled was our arrangements with Eastern European countries to establish missile defense systems in their countries, and to coordinate missile defense with them. Not a good call on his part.

You can’t really use them for much.

I’m open to looking at any informed criticism of a reduction in our nuclear stockpile, and I’m in favor of increasing funding for more and better delivery systems. So far, I haven’t seen any specific evidence that this is an unwise course of action — just historical allusions that may or may not fit. Is it possible that MAD is our Maginot Line? Sure, but I’d like to see evidence of such before abandoning a real-world observation which has proven true for 60+ years.

on account of an attack that took out a skyscraper. Several countries helped us in both endeavors. Betting against the fighting spirit of Americans following a direct attack is a losing move. Countries that don’t see this probably won’t be deterred just because we have 300 nukes, instead of ~2000.

which is why I favor research into both missile defense and advanced delivery systems.

I don’t think that defending against a nuclear attack has high priority when MAD is still the name of the game, but it does have some priority. A 95+% accuracy ICBM defense network would certainly be a game-changer.

The sinking of the Maine, Texas’ border skirmish with Mexico, the sinking of the Lusitania — the American people have supported war over far less direct attacks than an EMP burst. Even 9/11 was a far less direct attack from Afghanistan to the US than an EMP attack from a nation-state against our country would be. An EMP burst would be the most destructive attack suffered by American citizens on American soil since the Civil War. The second that some American kid starves to death because of an Iranian or Chinese EMP, is the second that either country becomes rubble, or something close to it, IMO. Our politicians and our people both like war, and are pretty good at it.

that will stop nutters like OBL: if you believe that God is on your side and that the heathens are destined to fail regardless, then there is no such thing as deterrence. For goodness sake, the Soviets were no pushovers when it came to crushing dissent or responding to threats, and the various fundamentalist groups still fought them in Afghanistan! OBL and co had to have known that they wouldn’t have responded by bombing a few aspirin factories! To quote one of my favorite books, “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.” It’s part of the reason that an Iranian nuke could be potentially worrisome: with religious fanatics at the helm convinced of eternal rewards awaiting them, MAD need not apply.

I do agree that we need to be more consistent in our responses and keep incentives in mind, but I think that’s immaterial to the discussion of how many nukes we have or need.

but that it probably determines less of our religious enemies’ actions than is commonly assumed.

Would OBL have been less aggressive in his terror attacks if Clinton had been more firm in Iraq and Somalia? Maybe — but given the 1991 WTC bombings and past precedent, I don’t think that can be proven.

Going back further, would Islamic terror groups have been as aggressive if Reagan hadn’t withdrawn our troops from Lebanon? Again, maybe — but I just don’t see any evidence for such.

It is telling that in the wake of the near-complete destruction of Al-Qaeda as an organization and the obliteration of its senior leadership, its remnants are still attempting terror attacks of various types against us. My opinion? Religious fanatics will always oppose us

Vis a vis Iran, one of two things is true: either the religious messianic beliefs that it professes belief in are followed by senior leadership to the extent that the will choose regime extinction if they feel that they can do enough damage, or they are a rational regime masquerading themselves as religious fanatics. If the former is true, there’s very little that deterrence can do: as long as the regime is in charge, path dependence will dictate their actions. If the latter is true, then they still have very rational reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, and the incentives which we have been providing thus far are not good ones — and certainly won’t dissuade them from their course. In either case, I think containment is our best bet: it limits the export of Iran’s ideology, and of course makes their regional goals very difficult to achieve. It has its problems (primarily, that Russia and China might not be willing to cooperate), but is likely the best of a series of bad options.

We have forces and carrier groups deployed in the ME and elsewhere in the world, and it is unlikely that our European allies or regional ME polities would take this laying down — if merely out of self-preservation, the economic damage that would ensue, and preservation of MAD. Even if Iran could do what you’ve described (and they won’t be anywhere near that point in terms of delivery systems, warhead yield, or economic capability of carrying out such an attack for quite some time), and even if the response were not nuclear, they would be crushed by conventional forces in a matter of weeks.

There are easier ways to take the US out of the picture temporarily that would be far less damaging to Iran and have a greater surety of success — such as sucking up to a weak President, taking advantage of a US involved in turf wars elsewhere, finding something to exchange with us, or simply having a certain amount of nuclear ordinance for deterrence. It all depends on what Iran seeks to accomplish abroad, but I think that they could more easily survive even a direct nuclear attack on Israel, than an EMP attack on the US homeland.