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Curious: Do we actually know that we stopped nuclear advances? I'm guessing it's not something that would be publicized.

• throwanem 10y ago
  The end of the Cold War took a lot of the urgency out of nuclear weapons research, and with the urgency went the funding. That's why the US nuclear arsenal consists of designs from the 1960s and 70s, with little or no manufacture more recent than the 80s, and a litany of canceled programs from the 90s on. Quite aside from that, there's a point past which chasing higher yields results in a loss of strategic flexibility, which is why both we and the Soviets eventually gave that up. (You can attack one big target with multiple warheads, but you can't attack multiple targets with one big warhead.) Modern nuclear weapons research and engineering, whatever there may be of it, would concentrate on boring stuff like improving efficiency and reliability, and reducing mass.