Countries spend billions of dollars on defense every year, and some of that money inevitably gets squandered. Nobody likes “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but it’s impossible to eliminate it completely when you are spending vast sums on a wide array of military programs. More effective efforts to address this problem are desirable—i.e., it would be nice if the U.S. Defense Department could pass an audit every now and then—but the most obvious way to save money on defense is to simply not waste money pursuing unnecessary capabilities and impossible goals.

Case in point: Now that most of the major arms control treaties have expired or been abrogated, the United States, Russia, and China are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals. Other nuclear-armed states are improving their forces too, albeit more modestly.

Countries spend billions of dollars on defense every year, and some of that money inevitably gets squandered. Nobody likes “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but it’s impossible to eliminate it completely when you are spending vast sums on a wide array of military programs. More effective efforts to address this problem are desirable—i.e., it would be nice if the U.S. Defense Department could pass an audit every now and then—but the most obvious way to save money on defense is to simply not waste money pursuing unnecessary capabilities and impossible goals.

Case in point: Now that most of the major arms control treaties have expired or been abrogated, the United States, Russia, and China are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals. Other nuclear-armed states are improving their forces too, albeit more modestly.

In this case, however, “modernizing” doesn’t just mean replacing aging or obsolete systems with more reliable versions: It also means making one’s forces more lethal, accurate, stealthy, rapidly retargetable, etc., and significantly increasing the number of warheads in the arsenal. And the underlying goal behind all this spending isn’t merely preserving each state’s second-strike capability, because that is comparatively easy for major powers to do. Instead, the United States (and probably some others) will spend a lot of that money trying to obtain a credible ability to fight a nuclear war without suffering unacceptable damage.

Here’s the problem: Since the very beginning of the nuclear age, it has been obvious that the nature of these weapons makes it extremely difficult to achieve genuine invulnerability against any reasonably capable adversary. Modern nuclear weapons are small, light, easily hidden, and enormously destructive. For any country, having five or 10 atomic or hydrogen bombs land on its major cities would be a disaster of horrific proportions, far exceeding any possible political gains. Just try to imagine what possible benefits would be worth the United........

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