Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
The Growing Nuclear Danger
By Steven Weinberg
The United States possesses an enormous nuclear arsenal, left over from the days of the cold war. We have about 6,000 operationally deployed nuclear weapons,[1] of which roughly 2,000 are on intercontinental ballistic missiles, 3,500 on submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and a few hundred carried by bomber aircraft. These are thermonuclear weapons, considerably more powerful than the fission bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Looking over these figures, one can hardly help asking, what are all these nuclear weapons for?
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