Obama’s atomic choices
After a painstaking, months-long process, one of the issues still being hashed out at the end of the deliberations on Barack Obama’s new Nuclear Posture Review was whether his administration could finally go public with the precise number of nuclear warheads held by the United States. Those arguing to disclose the total said it would ...
After a painstaking, months-long process, one of the issues still being hashed out at the end of the deliberations on Barack Obama's new Nuclear Posture Review was whether his administration could finally go public with the precise number of nuclear warheads held by the United States.
After a painstaking, months-long process, one of the issues still being hashed out at the end of the deliberations on Barack Obama’s new Nuclear Posture Review was whether his administration could finally go public with the precise number of nuclear warheads held by the United States.
Those arguing to disclose the total said it would set an example for the rest of the world. Obama’s report was the first in the post-Cold War era to be entirely unclassified, and the document called on China, in particular, to be more transparent about its nuclear forces and intentions. An accounting of the total number of American warheads would be a highly symbolic move.
Those arguing to keep the number secret said it was too dangerous to reveal, offering states or terrorists seeking to build their own weapons a clue to the amount of fissile material necessary for a bomb. The fear was they might be able to calculate this by comparing the warhead total with previous statements on stocks of fissile material. (Update: the number was declassified on May 3, 2010.)
David E. Hoffman covered foreign affairs, national politics, economics, and served as an editor at the Washington Post for 27 years.
He was a White House correspondent during the Reagan years and the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and covered the State Department when James A. Baker III was secretary. He was bureau chief in Jerusalem at the time of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, and served six years as Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous Yeltsin era. On returning to Washington in 2001, he became foreign editor and then, in 2005, assistant managing editor for foreign news. Twitter: @thedeadhandbook
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