The End of Overkill? Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy

President Obama has voiced his ambition to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to as few as 1,000 deployed warheads. The U.S. has cut the arsenal’s size since the Cold War’s end, but around 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons remain tied to a triad of systems – bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Current plans call for modernizing all three systems, which could cost taxpayers over $100 billion. This new report, The End of Overkill: Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, by Benjamin H. Friedman, Christopher A. Preble, and Matt Fay, explains how the triad came from bureaucratic compromises, not strategic necessity, and argues for basing U.S. nuclear weapons exclusively on submarines – a strategy that would serve U.S. deterrent needs and eventually save taxpayers roughly $20 billion a year.

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