Reliable Replacement Madness

The nuclear madness of the Cold War will continue reliably for the foreseeable future. Sixteen years ago, the United States had thousands of nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert to vaporize the Soviet Union in a mushroom cloud with thirty-minutes notice. Today nothing has changed; the US is pursuing the construction of the Reliable Replacement Warhead with a maximum yield of 475 kilotons. Nobody is saying that this will be easy or sane, given that nobody is planning on detonating the weapon fully assembled at nuclear yield. It may fizzle, and become the unreliable replacement warhead.