The US arsenal is large, accurate, flexible, and relatively low-yield — all characteristics associated with counterforce targeting.
The large could just be left over from the arms race. Accurate and flexible could be because the US has a big defense budget and likes using advanced technology. Low yield means more people killed for the same amount of total explosive energy in a countervalue scenario. So I don’t think this should be a large update towards counterforce. However, I think it does make sense to have some probability mass on counterforce as I did on my risk analysis.
Thanks for all your work on this!
The large could just be left over from the arms race. Accurate and flexible could be because the US has a big defense budget and likes using advanced technology. Low yield means more people killed for the same amount of total explosive energy in a countervalue scenario. So I don’t think this should be a large update towards counterforce. However, I think it does make sense to have some probability mass on counterforce as I did on my risk analysis.