So Obama is trying to reduce our number of Nuclear weapons from 2200 to 1550. I decided to crunch some numbers (Excel style) to see just how many people could be spared by such a decrease.
Methodology:
I took the populations for the 2200 most populace cities in 2005 (1) and made a list. I assumed that if the US decided to deploy all of its nuclear missiles that it would aim for the largest targets. The population values are based on the population within the city limits, so we can assume that all of those people would, in fact, be impacted by a nuclear attack. Some cities have much larger urban populations than the figures used so this is a conservative estimate.
To calculate the number for the new plan, I only used the population for the 1550 most populace cities.
Note: US cities are included in the total because I’m lazy. I feel that the point is still conveyed though. Total Death Toll W/ 2200 Bombs:
–1,461,367,817–
Total Death Toll W/ 1550 Bombs:
–1,338,014,968–
A difference of **123,352,849. **
Total World Population:
–6,881,200,000–(2)
Keep in mind that these are bombs only possessed by the USA. Russia has an equal number of nuclear arms. In short, there are WAY too many nuclear bombs in the world.
I have the excel sheet if anyone cares to take a look.
The more nukes in the world, the less likely anyone is to benefit from a first strike because the capability of retaliation is there, and the less likely anyone is to think they could get through a nuclear war with acceptable losses. More warheads and more survivable delivery systems make it less likely that any would ever be used. A world with 10 or 20 nuclear warheads is arguably a scarier place than a world with 20,000.
That said, 2200 to 1500 probably won’t upset the status quo too much.
I know that is the point of the restructure. I just wanted to see how many people could be harmed in a worse case scenario. Maybe some other people were curious too.
Once someone has nuclear capability then having more weapons as a deterrent is a logical step. I do think that the rate at which the USA and Russia stockpiled weapons is insane. We may never have a world without nuclear weapons, but the closer we get, the easier it is to monitor those weapons and make sure that the wrong people don’t have them. Plus, why should a third of the population die because a couple of heads of states disagree? It’s nonsensical.
The calculation in the OP is meaningless. Some significant percentage (I’m sure the details are classified) of nuclear weapons would be targeted at the enemy’s missile silos, not at cities.
And in any case, if Russia drops the bomb on the US, we aren’t going to retaliate by nuking Toronto, Cape Town, Perth, Mumbai, and Jerusalem.
Actually, Russia has more weapons, as their weapon dismantlement program has consistently run behind schedule. Also, understand that the numbers refer to weapons in the Active Stockpile (and equivalent for other nations), and that more weapons are held in reserve in the Inactive Stockpile, not mounted to delivery systems but capable of being reactivated in a short period of time (weeks). In addition to the United States and Russia, there is the UK (~150), France (~300), the Peoples Republic of China (~200), Pakistan (est. 20-40), India (est. 20-50), and Israel (estimates vary from 50 to 300, including advanced boosted fission and low yield tactical weapons). South Africa and the Ukraine have dismantled their active weapon programs, and so far no other nation is known to have produced a workable weapon.
It should be understood that even reduced number of weapons doesn’t correlate linearly with a reduction in deaths and socio-economic impact. Even a limited strike against an industrial nation would have severe repercussions, and with so many players there simply is no stable deterrent strategy. As former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, once the architect of the United States’ “Assured Destruction” deterrence strategy, repeatedly stated in his later criticism of Cold War policy, “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.” There is no “safe” level of nuclear armament; unfortunately, it is at least perceived that it is safer to have too many than too little, a proposition that does have a certain paranoid logic to it. Ultimately, nuclear weapons are political tools; as weapons, they’re too destructive and demand too high of a price for an opponent to not retaliate for them to be useful in a purely battlefield sense. Their real utility is in the appearance of willingness to use. I
f that seems like an insane rationale for constructing not only an arsenal costing hundreds of billions of dollars to build and more to maintain, but also the facilities to support and secure the weapons, well, you can be excused for being rational. However, those same systems also gave us the integrated circuit, the Global Positioning System, and space launch vehicles that can go to Earth orbit and beyond. While we’d rather keep the side products and eliminate the weapons, the reality is that nothing short of a miracle will allow world powers to acknowledge the lack of necessity and depravity of maintaining such weapons in the post Cold War environment.
Plus, of course, high-priority targets are going to be hit by multiple nukes. Nobody’s going to say “Well, we’ve got one headed to Moscow (or DC), that ought to do it”.
And there’s probably at least one missile earmarked for each carrier battle group, each military base of any sort, and so on.
When I was a kid ,we spent a lot of time worried about when the Russians would send their nukes over to destroy us. The newspapers published issues showing the most likely targets to cause the most damage to our infrastructure and population. One such map showed an ideal target was within walking distance of my home. I kind of resigned myself to a nuclear death. I was just a kid. It was not comforting.