24 Dec '16 03:22>
Originally posted by blaze8492Of the NPT states Britain has the smallest arsenal with 180 warheads with forty in use at any one time for continuous at sea deterrence, with the others in reserve or on exercise. Since the British government consider forty 100 kiloton warheads sufficient deterrent against a pre-emptive strike from the Russians, who have a huge arsenal and a lot of land area as well as an ABM system protecting Moscow I really do not think there is any conceivable current or future nuclear weapons state who will not be deterred by either the UK's, or any of the other P5's arsenals, or at least if they are not then no amount of nuclear weapons are going to help. The only possible valid reason to would be to maintain parity with the Russians were they to increase their arsenal.
Point taken about the identification of the 2nd world. I was careless, although I didn't quite feel it was appropriate to label them all 3rd world, since Pakistan is technically 2nd world and India received it's independence after the formation of NATO, and has a nuclear arsenal. Knowing that Pakistan pursued it's weapons well into the 1980s, without act ...[text shortened]... before formation of NATO. achievement of the bomb was long after the formation of NATO though.
What I was trying to get at with the cases of both Libya and Iran is that verification by the IAEA, some intelligence work and a combination of diplomatic and economic pressure were successful in the case of Libya and apparently so in the case of Iran in getting them to abandon their nuclear weapons programs.
Given that the US increasing its arsenal could cause the other NPT nuclear weapons states to increase theirs, as well as undermining the non-proliferation treaty and so encouraging non-nuclear weapons states to withdraw from the treaty and produce warheads, and not necessarily in that order. So I feel that the risks with a policy of increasing the size of the US arsenal are all on the downside.
Improvements to the warheads such as safety, stealth and other anti-ABM systems, and tweaking yields in response to strategic reassessments and so forth are reasonable enough since they are unlikely to cause nuclear proliferation.