“When the world learns the terrible secret of Los Alamos, our work here will ensure a peace mankind has never seen – a peace based on the kind of international cooperation Roosevelt always envisioned.” (Oppenheimer) With the recent pop culture success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, it’s easy to venerate the work and vision of the American scientists who developed one of the most destructive devices in human history. The cold war and nuclear threats are now at most a faint memory, and to the much of the younger generation an inconsequential era in a history textbook.

It would seem as though in the modern day the political dogma of mutually assured destruction has ensured peace, or at least the prevention of conflict escalation. However, the nuclear-weapon states of the world still possess enough atomic firepower to end all human life multiple times over. Furthermore, tensions have risen recently with Russia’s suspension of the New START treaty and Putin’s threats to use tactical nuclear weapons should the tides turn in the Russo-Ukrainian war. As a nation, we must evaluate if stockpiling a nuclear arsenal is still a viable deterrent to conflict, or if it would be in the best interests of the country and the world to push for disarmament, cutting the high costs of the program and reducing the threat of a world-ending war. 

The above paragraphs will be (roughly) the introduction to my issue brief, and should describe the exigence of this issue. To that effect, this issue brief will be aimed mostly at policymakers at the federal level, as well as normal American citizens who might not be aware of the current crisis, yet who still can sway national politics when banded together. 

The cause of the current issue of an overwhelming stockpile of nuclear weapons is largely a mechanical one. Fueled by fear of the Soviet Union during the cold war, American officials implemented the policies and organizations to maintain a technological lead over their adversaries, whose exact arsenal size was unknown. To be sure of a lead, the US produced around 5,100 nuclear warheads by 1961. 

Additional logistics of America’s nuclear weapon program also exacerbated a desire for nuclear weapon development.  Although both ultimately funded by the US Government, the “buyers” of nuclear weapons, the branches of the US military, and the providers/developers of nuclear weapons, the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy), were provided with separate budgets and funding. The cost of nuclear weapons manufacturing came entirely at the expense of the Atomic Energy Commission, meaning that the military essentially viewed nuclear weapons as free, ordering nuclear weaponry to be manufactured when conventional weapons systems would work just as well. 

Similarly, the funding and prestige that came with the nuclear program sparked its own sort of arms race within America, with separate branches of the military and different national labs all competing against one another. Each of these factions sought to develop better methods of nuclear weapon deployment and designs in order to gain said funding and prestige. 

However, the end of the cold war and the enactment of the New START treaty in 2011 put an end to the rapid development of nuclear arms and the nation saw significant progress towards arms reduction. The US has reduced its arsenal to 3,708 warheads, and Russia 4,489 as of 2023. But Russia has now suspended the New START treaty, meaning that neither country has assurance of the capacity of the other’s arsenal, nor a restriction on rebuilding their nuclear stockpiles. 

Much of this issue lies outside our hands; much of it requires acknowledgement from Russia. I think to some extent capacity builders need to be enforced, informing the public of the true horrors of nuclear war but also the past successes with nuclear disarmament. This could be as simple as making these topics a requirement in high school education. A larger reform needs to be a system change: we need to bring international negotiations to the forefront of the stage, since worldwide collaboration is the only way to solve this issue. In a perfect world, a strategic arms reduction treaty would be extended to all of the nuclear-weapon states of the world, where each could verify the others’ development and deployment of nuclear arms.