Yahoo.com: US says it has 5,113 nuclear warheads

[mistertim]

My position has been very consistant in this whole thing. I asked Larry from the beginning to provide the link about what he claims, that has not changed, but whatever. Larry's original assertation was that they are not targeted at anything and I called him on it. The REACT link actually backs up what I said originially, that they are pretargeted. Your fighting so hard for Larry its almost like you have battered wife syndrome.

And what about your implications that they apparently take too long or are too hard to "re-target", and hence wouldn't allow us to deal with all of the threats we could have?

Now when you start having other countries gain capabilities we now have to start carving out part of our arsonal to deal with those threats.

You don't just walk into NORAD and change targets on a whim...hey...point that sucker there are Eye-ran.

[Zguy28]

I was surprised we didn't have like 20K warheads.

[Predicto]

I was surprised we didn't have like 20K warheads.

We used to.

That evil liberal weakling Ronald Reagan negotiated a lot of them away to the commies.

[mjah]

And what about your implications that they apparently take too long or are too hard to "re-target", and hence wouldn't allow us to deal with all of the threats we could have?

Exactly.

That was a major thrust of sacase's thunderously incorrect statement, the one he's still running from. (Which, like sidestepping, doesn't work very well at the bottom of a deep hole.)

And accusing people of ganging up on him to back each other up, instead of just pointing out the truth -- LOL. I guess the truth naturally leads to the formation of big, mean "truth squads."

[Seabee1973]

Thats not the active number just the total number of warheads

[Titaw]

What I find funny is that we have seen the techology on the news. We have seen cameras on missles, we have even seen and know about UAVs as well. If you think for one second that we have not applied those technologies to our most powerful weapons, you're fooling yourself.

[Corcaigh]

We used to.

That evil liberal weakling Ronald Reagan negotiated a lot of them away to the commies.

[NavyDave]

We used to.

That evil liberal weakling Ronald Reagan negotiated a lot of them away to the commies.

Oh really? For some reason I recall some liberals and media types shaking in their boots thinking President Reagan was serious about his joke about bombing Russia and thought commies were their only hope.

Bush the elder and Clinton is where you saw the beginning of significant drops after President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, etc ended the Cold War though some would have you believe it was all Mikhail Gorbachev.

[mjah]

Corcaigh's chart suggests that we've either decommissioned or dismantled (the mix isn't given) a total of almost 30,000 nukes over the past several decades. That's presumably not counting pieces of the Russian/Soviet stockpile which we've taken on.

That's one hell of a lot of some heavy primordial elements. What have we done with all the tasty fissile/fusile centers of these 30,000 warheads? Both Uranium and Plutonium of appropriate grades and isotopes can be used to generate power, but surely all that weapons-grade U and Pu couldn't have been processed into peaceful reactor-capable fuel, spacecraft power systems, tiny-sample sources for physics and chemistry classes... could it?

It seems that it has gone somewhere though, because I occasionally read about NASA getting nervous that Pu reserves won't be available to power future spacecraft...

[mcsluggo]

[Predicto]

Oh really? For some reason I recall some liberals and media types shaking in their boots thinking President Reagan was serious about his joke about bombing Russia and thought commies were their only hope.

Bush the elder and Clinton is where you saw the beginning of significant drops after President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, etc ended the Cold War though some would have you believe it was all Mikhail Gorbachev.

Jeez. Even when I compliment Ronald Reagan, you get your panties in a bunch and rush to attack. Take a deep breath.