NEW YORK, April 1. /TASS/. Experts with the Heritage Foundation conservative think tank and a group of US lawmakers have warned US President Donald Trump’s administration that the country’s nuclear arsenal is in need of major modernization, Fox News reports.
Bob Peters, strategic deterrence fellow at Heritage, points out that since the end of the Cold War, the US has "dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons around the world, signed multiple arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, and today has an arsenal that is roughly 85% smaller than the ones it fielded at the height of the Cold War."
Meanwhile, in Peter’s words, China is "building nuclear-capable long-range hypersonic missiles that could in time be able to deliver nuclear weapons to the American homeland with little to no notice."
The Heritage Foundation argues that Washington "has too few tactical nuclear weapons when compared with China." The analysts believe that the United States "must modernize the existing strategic arsenal and replace the decades-old warheads and missiles."
Most of the US nuclear weapons are over 35 years old, "meant to be retired and replaced in the 1980s," Peters emphasized. "Like a 1975 Cadillac bought by our grandfather, we've been keeping America's strategic deterrence on life support," the expert said.
According to the analysts, "the US removed naval and land-based tactical nuclear weapons from [South] Korea in 1991 and retired the nuclear variants of the Tomahawk cruise missile that were stationed across the Pacific." Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, believes that the US authorities had underestimated Beijing’s ability to increase its nuclear arsenal as Beijing has tripled its nuclear arsenal over the past five years, and plans to go from 500 to 1,000 warheads by 2030.
Congressman Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, observed that the US had been focused on the Middle East for years, "at the expense of containing threats in the Indo-Pacific region."
US nuclear arsenal
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the US nuclear stockpile's total firepower peaked in 1960 at over 20,000 megatons, equivalent to 20 billion tons of TNT, or enough for 1.36 million detonations the size of the one that exploded over Hiroshima. The Pentagon had the highest number of warheads - 31,300 - at its disposal in 1967. The US nuclear arsenal declined by 30% in the next 20 years following the signing of a number of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and by another 75% after 1991.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US possessed 1,770 deployed nuclear warheads as of January 2023. American experts say that 100 tactical bombs are deployed to military bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey.
The US nuclear triad consists of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) and heavy strategic bombers. The Minuteman III ICBM has been in service since 1970; the B-52H Stratofortress and B-2 Spirit bombers were put into service in 1955 and 1997 respectively; and the Ohio-class submarines equipped with UGM-133 Trident II missiles were introduced into service in 1990.