Japanese military - how strong should it be?

Originally posted by no1marauder
Nations defeated after waging aggressive, ruthless war don't get to make that judgment.

Does that remain the case, even if the former government is nowhere to be seen, and the culture has evolved considerably over 60 years?

How long does the premise hold, and who gets to enforce it?

Originally posted by wittywonka
I don't envision the United States needing to wipe any entire countries off the map any time soon. And if we did need to, we'd have bigger concerns by that point, anyway.

Positioning of those 10 hypothetical nuclear weapons seems irrelevant to me, anyway, considering the intercontinental range of modern warfare.

The only practical application of nuclear weapons is preventative. The policy of MAD, arguably prevented hot war between the Soviet and Western blocks for the entire cold war.

Whether this rationale still is applicable is doubtful, with suicidal religious fanaticism running rampant. Some will gladly accept mutual destruction, and martyrdom.

Originally posted by no1marauder
It's actually the other way around; the Soviet (now Russian) arsenal was developed to prevent the US from waging a first strike. The US has always had a superiority in strategic nuclear weapons.

In the early days of the cold war, the delivery of nukes was by B52s, and Russian heavy bombers. Many of these would not get through, so both nations developed overkill numbers of both bombers and bombs.

Orbiting satellites created the practical intercontinental ballistic missile, which could reach targets in about a half hour, leaving little time for anything but an all out counter attack. MIRV increased this threat, as did submarine based missiles.

The possibility of Laser shoot downs of incomings revives the old concerns of needing overkill capacity, to deny any possibility of a second wave.

I don't know who had the strategic superiority. Can we really trust the information our government or that of the Soviets made public?

Originally posted by wittywonka
A nuclear deterrent is a nuclear deterrent is a nuclear deterrent. The United States only needs enough firepower to prevent the first nuclear attack against it.

Besides, it's not like those "camel jockey terrorists" care about our nuclear stockpiles (except with regards to how they might somehow use one of our own missiles against us)--it's not like 9/11 wouldn't have happened if we had had 50,000 nuclear weapons instead of 5,000.

One of the problems of the post cold war world, is that the arms of the former Soviet Union, are not very well controlled by the Russian government. For decades now Russian military equipment and supplies have been sold all over the world. The AK 47, is the premier battle rifle in the world, most of them manufactured during cold war years. The Russians say they control, and can account for all their nukes, but is that believable? Especially when almost the entire souther tier of former Soviet republics are hostile to Russia, and many have significant populations of Islamic jihadists.

Another problem regarding nukes is that they are not totally stable. After decades of storage, and no testing, we don't know for sure how they will work. We haven't done testing for a long time.