“The Bush administration announced in 2004 that it had decided to cut the nuclear weapons stockpile “nearly in half” by 2012, but has refused to disclose the actual numbers. Yet a fact sheet published by the Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that the stockpile will decline from approximately 9,938 warheads today to approximately 5,047 warheads by the end of 2012.”
http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2007/05/estimates_of_us_nuclear_weapon.php

This is precisely what Eisenhower warned about.

Though, I do not like having so many nuclear weapons, and I think I believe that our conventional forces can be enough of a deterrent combined with a smaller nuclear arsenal.

The only colony that the British lost in the course of an armed struggle was America. Britain’s decline as an empire has been marked by the deliberate relinquishing of territory in an orderly way. Canada, Australia, India, Hong Kong, etc. All were orderly and voluntary withdrawals in which the British were able to take with them any military assets that they desired. If Britain had a nuclear arsenal in 1800, it would all still be under their control.

Waldo,

See, this is what I have a problem with. Calling for a reduction in our nuclear arsenal on the sole basis of it sounding like too big a number. The number of nukes it would take to wipe out the population of Russia or the entire world, multiplied or divided by whatever factor, bears no relationship to what is a sound doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

It’s like finding out that there are 10,000 fire extinguishers in the City of Charlottesville and calling for a reduction to 100 fire extinguishers because that would be enough fire extinguishers to put out every fire expected to start on the Downtown Mall over the next year. This would just have no relationship to reality in terms of a sound strategy for fighting fires around Charlottesville. You might need a fire extinguisher right away in any of the thousands of buildings in Charlottesville and waiting for one to be brought from elsewhere could lead to disaster. The vast majority of those fire extinguishers will probably never be used. But we need them all around anyway because we can’t predict the future and say exactly which ones will be needed.

If we’re going to come up with a figure for how much we should reduce the nuclear arsenal by, it should be based in reality. I’m sure that we could reduce it by some amount. I am just opposed to grabbing numbers essentially out of thin air rather than as a result of a clear and meticulous plan for global response to every possible type of nuclear threat from a state actor.

[and when I'm President I will approach the matter in exactly such a clear and meticulous way]

For example, the big thing we learned from DDT was that pesticides need to biodegrade so they don’t keep moving through the ecosystem. We now also have biological controls that can be very effective. Like other epidemics, the real issue is simply that first world nations would rather not help these countries come up with effective solutions. (After all, how many people die of malaria in Lousiana or Florida every year?)

Likewise, as other people have pointed out, very small changes in the way we build homes, vehicles and other devices can result in a huge savings in energy. The fact that many things, like cars, were actually more efficient a decade ago indicate that it is completely possible to use less oil, we just aren’t doing it. When you look closer into the reasons, it’s clear that often the oil industry and other narrow finincial interests are using their weight to prevent more efficient technologies.

Making it seem like its all about sweaters and mosquito nets is really just avoiding the actual issues. I’d also argue that the current conflict(s) in the Middle East demonstrate that national security isn’t nearly as simple as who has the largest nuclear arsenal. If you present false choices, you’ll always end up with screwy conclusions.

John,

Really great points, and yes a lot of non-OPEC oil came into production (cheap oil actually destroyed huge sectors of the Soviet economy and had as much of an effect on the fall of that particular empire as anything else . . . Anyway you actually saw OPEC’s share of world production drop from 70% to 30% . . . am I right about that? . . . I think I am, dont have time to look it up. Regardless OPEC’s share the market dropped, BUT world consumption did increase and 30% is still a huge chunk.

And as I am sure you know, Ahmed Zaki Yamani once famously said “The stone age did not end for a want of rocks, and the oil age will not end for a want of oil.” Or something like that . . .

In other words the Saudi’s are acutely aware of the danger’s that alternative energy and new efficiencies pose to the economic future of their kingdom. And they are certainly aware of what starts to happen when the price of crude gets TOO high . . . they learned a very important lesson from their embargo experience.

Really great points, and yes a lot of non-OPEC oil came into production (cheap oil actually destroyed huge sectors of the Soviet economy and had as much of an effect of the fall of that particular empire as anything else . . . Anyway you actually saw OPEC’s share of world production drop from 70% to 30% . . . am I right about that? . . . I think I am, dont have time to look it up. Regadless OPEC’s share the market dropped, BUT world consuption did increase and 30% is still a huge chunk.

And as I am sure you know, Ahmed Zaki Yamani once famously said “The stone age did not end for a want of rocks, and the oil age will not end for a want of oil.” Or something like that . . .

In other words the Saudi’s are accutly aware of the danger’s that alternative energy and new effciances pose to the econmic future of their kingdom. And they are certainly aware of what starts to happen when the price of crude gets TOO high . . . they learned a very important lesson from their imbargo experance.

Some great points in that last post, mostly related to entropy. Just a few notes:

While increased production in oil from the Persian Gulf as part of it, the North Sea and Alaska fields came online at the same time, due to exploration during the 1973 oil embargo. There was so much oil hitting the market that the price of West Texas crude dropped as low as $10 a barrel [1]. So CAFE was less discarded over an intentional plot by Aramco or the Al-Saud family, but more so sheer supply and demand. Everyone got drunk on cheap oil, and corporations encouraged the laxing of standards since the pain of 1973 was a distant memory.

Some things to add (that relate to other articles on Waldo’s site in relation to his home construction adventure):

Outside of the actual burning of fossil fuels in automobiles, the throwaway society of America, encouraging a new car every three to five years, creates a massive junkyard. It’s a three ton chunk of steel and fiberglass. It doesn’t just disappear. It’s almost impossible to recycle. Toyotas typically reach 200k miles before the engine becomes pretty useless. Look how many “pre-owned” cars you can purchase that rarely have over $30k miles on them. I don’t have a url, but I recall a reference that we place 15 million *additional* cars on the road each year.

And to your note about LA, 100% an issue:

The amount of energy waste from buildings, namely single family homes, that do not take into account location and site must be staggering. Passive solar building design [2] and looking at the ways that houses were build pre-electrification to influence modern design [3] would help reduce the use of electricity derived from the burning of fossil fuels and instead utilize true solar energy. Since fossil fuels are basically trapped solar energy from millions of years ago courtesy of various forms of plant and animal life, it’s going straight to the source.

“Mission” style architecture wasn’t just a fad. It was the result of local building materials and dealing with a near desert climate. These are actually very similar to mosques seen in Cordoba, Spain and North Africa. [4]

[1] Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency p.54
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
[3] http://www.phys.ufl.edu/%7Eliz/home.html and http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~liz/design.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_the_California_missions

Second Nukes are so expensive to build they can only be done by spending billions and billions of dollars from the US treasury. Why spend so much damn money on a technology that is going to run out of reasonable priced fuel in 50 years!?

And third lets look at Carter’s legacy, and the legacy of government mandates in energy efficiency.

Between 1975 and 2000, even as the American economy grew by nearly 50 percent, our energy intensity fell by 40 percent.

Lets look at where some of these gains came from:

In 1975 we passed the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, at the time the the average car got between 10-15 miles a gallon. By 1985 the average had increased to 25 mgp and despite 27 percent growth in our economy oil demand dropped by more than one-sixth.

Now the Saudis didn’t like this so they flooded the market with cheap oil, and low and behold we froze CAFE.

Where Carter gets credit is mandating efficiencies in air conditioners, refrigerators and stronger building codes. Modern refrigerators use only 1/4 of the energy that 1970 models used; this alone avoided the construction of 40 new power plants.

There are still huge gains we could make in efficiencies:

Power Plants in the US discard more energy in “waste” heat than is needed to run the entire Japanese economy.

Less than a quarter of the energy used in the standard stove reaches the food.

The city of LA requires a whole extra power plant to cool the city from the solar heat absorbed by traditional dark roofs and asphalt.

Barely 15 percent of the energy in a gallon of gas ever reaches the wheels of a car.

Just a 2.7 mpg gain in the fuel economy of our light-vehicle fleet could displace Persian Gulf imports entirely.

And this isn’t even looking at the huge huge gains we could make by manufacturing autos out of light weight composite materials or making the bottoms of cars as aerodynamic as the tops.

Ok my girlfriend needs me to help clean the house, so I gotta go, but you get my point.

If your answer involves spending $20 bn from the US Treasury on mosquito nets and cajoling Americans to use less energy a la Jimmy Carter in a sweater then I’m afraid your solutions are simply politically and economically untenable.

It’s better to compromise and achieve some degree of success than fail but remain ideologically pure.

In case you didn’t notice, in your desire to lump everyone in nice neat little categories, there are mant environmentalist who are for Nuke plants, because of the dire threat of Global Warming.

I think I disagree, though I am still on the fence

Here are the problems: There’s never been a serious conversation about what the hell to do with all the waste . . . just go to France, where they pretty much get all their power from Nukes, to see the problems that it is causing. Everyone is always going to NIMB’s when it comes to Nuke Waste, do you blame them?

Not to mention the security issues that the plants represent. Just like Michael Corleone says in the God Father 2, “if history has taught us anything, its that you can kill anyone.” Well the same applies for Nuke plants, no matter how well they are defended. Not to mention, how much is all that security going to add to my electric bill?

Then there is the final problem with Nuke power, we are actually running out of the fuel for them, we have somewhere between 50-100 years of “cheap” uranium reserves at CURRENT consumption rates (what happens if we double or triple that?)

Its the exact same problem with peak oil, still plenty of oil in the ground, it is just economically impossible to get to it.economicaly imposible to get to it.

However, if we have enough weapons to ensure at least mutually assured destruction in the worst-case scenario, then the additional warheads are just liabilities, and do not add to our economic power.

That’s the crux of it right there. If it takes, say, 60 nuclear weapons to wipe out the world, then let’s have, say, 10x that. That’s still just 6% of our current arsenal.

Were you counting delivery vehicles or deliverable warheads (i.e. MIRVs)?

The numbers are from Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which does not explain to which they’re referring. They present it contexts like this Marketplace interview, with explanation. I can only assume it would be deliverable warheads — counting delivery vehicles would strike as a pretty useless number.

Here’s Ben Cohen’s demonstration of the size of our arsenal:

~

I wonder if it’s so easy for so many people to advocate for and talk about nuclear weapons because they seem so unreal. More of a theoretical exercise than anything that would ever occur, perhaps.