this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Nuclear weapons are expensive and complicated to maintain. The military has been bitching for many years that the price to maintain old nuclear munitions is rapidly increasing.
Instead of seeing this as working as intended, and trying to get everyone to agree not to develop new nuclear weapons... The military strategists decided that since China was making 500 new nuclear weapons we needed to make new ones too and pulled out of the agreement with Russia not to develop new nukes.
I would have thought that if it was hard for us to maintain the nuclear weapons with a massive budget that Russia might fail at that task. Which would be good for everyone.
But there's always been more money in star wars and missile defense then diplomacy.
China has absolutely zero interest in negotiating arms treaties, they aren't quite in a full arms race with the US. The way arms limitations treaties work is if there is a rival state that will always match or exceed your armament, then you actually have an incentive to stop. If you don't have such a rival then you can always ensure that you are on the top and ignore any treaties.
Not disagreeing with you.
China did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) committing to nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.
But they're just saying they are not expanding, just modernizing!
https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/china-nuclear-disarmament/
They are however expected to expand by about double.
Right. The ~3k nukes the US has are too expensive to maintain, let's make more.
Sounds like the US.
If the maintenance and production of new ones is cheaper than maintaining the old ones, it makes sense to replace them. But then they’d have to actually replace/decommission the old ones.
Do you think it's cheaper to maintain stuff from 40 years ago, or to make something new?
Keep in mind you can't exactly go down to the nearest AutoZone to buy replacement parts either.