Just days after China announced that it would double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030, Pentagon officials revealed plans Tuesday for a new nuclear gravity bomb that would be 24 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. By Thursday, President Vladimir Putin had signed a bill withdrawing Russia from its inclusion in a global nuclear test ban — which was followed this week by a test launch from one of its submarines of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. That means, by default, the U.S. is also no longer part of the treaty, meaning we could once more begin dropping bombs in the New Mexico desert, à la “Oppenheimer,” though (thankfully) no such plans have been announced.
What (and I say this with all due respect) in the actual f**k is going on here? Is the world teetering off the edge? The hows are easier to explain than the whys when it comes to all this madness, so let’s start there.
The plans for a new nuke were rolled out almost exactly a year after the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review was published, which advocated for a bigger US nuclear flex to compete with the stockpile they estimated China would have built by 2030. As it turns out, that Chinese stockpile is getting much bigger, much faster than we thought — with “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads” as of May.
Hellbound and Down 