Tag Archives: nuclear weapons United States

Back to 2030: Nuclear Race is Hot Again

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The new nuclear race has begun. But unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. must prepare for two peer rivals rather than one—at a time when it has lost its clear industrial and economic edge. China, which long possessed just a small nuclear force, is catching up fast, while Russia is developing a variety of new-generation systems aimed at American cities…Russian President Vladimir Putin has already used nuclear saber-rattling to throttle American support for Ukraine. He has deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus and, in 2025, tested a nuclear-powered missile and a nuclear-powered submarine drone that he claims are impervious to American defenses.

While Russia and the U.S. are still abiding by some arms-controls limit…China, unconstrained by any commitments, is quietly but rapidly leaping ahead. According to American estimates, Beijing will reach rough parity with the U.S. in deployed nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the first time showcased China’s nuclear triad—its land, sea and air-launched ballistic nuclear missiles—at a Beijing parade honoring the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan in September 2025. Putin, sitting to his right atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, took note. So did North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, sitting to his left.

Excerpt from Yaroslav Trofimov, The Nuclear-Arms Race Is Now a Three-Way Contest, WSJ, Nov. 16, 2025

If There is Hell, it Must Be Like This

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On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people in a single day, and tens of thousands more in the subsequent months. “If there is a hell,” survivor Ōiwa Kōhei recalled thinking of the aftermath, “it must be just like this.” Kōhei, 13-years-old at the time, was plagued for months by radiation poisoning, and forever by the psychological trauma. The hibakusha — the Japanese term for atomic-bomb survivors — “will not be with us for much longer, so it is essential that their irreplaceable living testimony should continue to be diligently and accurately recorded while it is still available”, writes historian Mordecai Sheftall. Their testimony must be preserved not for historical record, but so that current and future generations will take the lessons of their experiences to heart, says Sheftall.

Excerpt from Mordecai Sheftall, The Sun had fallen to Earth’ — a survivor’s recollection of the Hiroshima bombing, Nature, August 5, 2025

The Never-Ending Nuclear Arms Race

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The United States Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) announced in October 2024 it had manufactured its first plutonium “pit”—used in the core of a thermonuclear warhead to initiate an nuclear explosion—since the United States largely halted such production in 1989. Under a nuclear arsenal modernization plan launched in 2008, the lab will scale up production to 30 pits per year, with an additional 50 to be produced annually starting in the mid-2030s at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. But the work faces opposition from critics who say it could help fuel a new international nuclear arms race and also risks the health of workers and the environment. In September 30 2024, opponents won a ruling in federal district court in South Carolina when a judge ruled the U.S. Department of Energy failed to adequately consider other options for locating the production facilities. The judge is considering a request to pause production at LANL. The United States halted pit manufacturing in 1989 at the Rocky Flats Plant, near Denver, after an inspection revealed hazardous waste contamination.

Excerpt from U.S. resumes making nuke triggers, Science, Oct. 11, 2024

China’s Nuclear Secrecy

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Since testing its first nuclear bomb 56 years ago, China has never revealed even a ballpark figure for the size of its arsenal. …America…would like it if China were to make its intentions so clear. It wants the country to end its obsessive secrecy and join America and Russia in setting limits to the size of their nuclear arsenals. The DF-41s, a new kind of intercontinental missile capable of hitting anywhere in America, first displayed in public in October 2019 at a National Day parade in Beijing are one reason why America is growing ever more keen to get China talking. They are China’s first missiles with such a range that can go on roads, making them more difficult for American weapons to knock out than ones fired from silos or fixed launchers. They can probably carry multiple warheads, making it even harder to protect America from their devastation.

By most estimates, China has less than 1,000 warheads—about 300 is widely considered to be a reasonable guess. By contrast, America and Russia have around 4,000 apiece. But whereas those two countries, over the decades, have signed pacts to prune their arsenals, China has sat out arms-control. Its nuclear forces have been growing in size and sophistication, in part to ensure that they could survive a surprise strike from America’s increasingly accurate weapons….

In 2019 America pulled out of a treaty with Russia banning medium-range missiles fired from land. It did so ostensibly because of Russian cheating, but the Pentagon made no secret of its desire to match China’s unchecked build-up of such weapons. Now China casts a shadow over the one nuclear pact that still binds America and Russia, the New start treaty. Signed in 2010, it caps “strategic” (ie, long-range) weapons and allows each side to inspect the other’s 18 times a year. It expires in February 2021, but could be renewed if both agree.  Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, says he is game. But Donald Trump and many of his advisers want China to sign up first. “The administration’s goal is to keep China’s stockpile from growing,” says Tim Morrison of the Hudson Institute…But China’s tradition of military secrecy is “deeply rooted”. Opening up will require trust. What little there is between China and America is being threatened by the pandemic. 

Excerpts from Arms Control: Be Afraid America, Economist, May 23, 2020