This may be in the Brookings estimate, which I haven’t read yet, but I wonder how much cost disease + reduction in nuclear force has affected the cost per warhead / missile. My understanding is that many military weapon systems get much more expensive over time for reasons I don’t well understand.
Warheads could be altered to increase the duration of radiation effects from fallout, but this would would also reduce their yield, and would represent a pretty large change in strategy. We’ve gone 70 years without such weapons, which the recent Russian submersible system as a possible exception. It seems unlikely such a shift in strategy will occur in the next 70 years, but like 3% unlikely rather than really unlikely.
It’s a good point that risks of extinction could get significantly worse if different/more nuclear weapons were built & deployed, and combined with other WMDs. And the existence of 70k+ weapons in the cold war presents a decent outside view argument that we might see that many in the future. I’ll edit the post to clarify that I mean present and not future risks from nuclear war.
This may be in the Brookings estimate, which I haven’t read yet, but I wonder how much cost disease + reduction in nuclear force has affected the cost per warhead / missile. My understanding is that many military weapon systems get much more expensive over time for reasons I don’t well understand.
Warheads could be altered to increase the duration of radiation effects from fallout, but this would would also reduce their yield, and would represent a pretty large change in strategy. We’ve gone 70 years without such weapons, which the recent Russian submersible system as a possible exception. It seems unlikely such a shift in strategy will occur in the next 70 years, but like 3% unlikely rather than really unlikely.
It’s a good point that risks of extinction could get significantly worse if different/more nuclear weapons were built & deployed, and combined with other WMDs. And the existence of 70k+ weapons in the cold war presents a decent outside view argument that we might see that many in the future. I’ll edit the post to clarify that I mean present and not future risks from nuclear war.