I could argue the claim on its merits, eg that the world has changed since The Delicate Balance of Terror was written in (checks) 1958, that omnipresent satelli

I could argue the claim on its merits, eg that the world has changed since The Delicate Balance of Terror was written in (checks) 1958, that omnipresent satellite surveillance means that a first strike could never wipe out the enemy nuclear arsenal, etc. But I think that's giving Brett too much credit here. His argument rests purely in the realm of game theory and logical-sounding ideas. In actual practice, the US military has never in its existence ran an analysis of how many nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve strategic objectives in any specific scenarios. Brett later points out that: > This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets. Brett notes this, but it doesn't seem to give him pause or to cause his to reevaluate the validity of the doctrines he cites, even though those doctrines were largely written to justify what he rightfully describes as absurdities. The US military has always, from the moment the nuclear bomb was invented, operated with the mindset of "more nukes is better". There is no conceivable number of nukes that would make the military go "okay, that's enough, we have enough to achieve our strategic objectives in any plausible scenario". As the quote above points out, giving them more nukes just makes them assign more per potential target. The only administration that chose to conduct a survey of the SAC's war plan for deploying nukes, the fucking Bush administration under Dick Cheney, found that the plan was ridiculously overkill (hence the quote above) which directly lead to the US signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.[1] HN commenters in this thread are giving a bunch of rationalizations why the US's nuclear policy is perfectly reasonable game theory, but any times military analysts with clearance actually looked at the US's nuke arsenal and the plans to deploy it, their conclusion was the same: "We have way more than we need". [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...