Those captured documents included Iraqi nuclear bomb designs that could be useful for other states working to build a nuclear arsenal.
With a nuclear arsenal at Saddam's disposal, would the U.S. have attacked?
In his Senate approval hearings during the Bush administration, Gates became the first senior US official to state publicly that Israel had a nuclear arsenal.
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Israel, itself the possessor of a nuclear arsenal of unknown size, is also watching closely and is quite capable of taking unilateral action if it feels threatened as the destruction of the Iraqi reactor in 1981 showed.
Mr. MICHAEL NACHT (Dean, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley): We maintain a nuclear arsenal to reassure our friends that they are secure and therefore reduce the arguments in their governments that they should themselves have nuclear weapons.
And what he had said, at least twice before the new NIE came out, and what he went out of his way to repeat the day after it came out, was that if we permitted Iran to build a nuclear arsenal, people fifty years from now would look back and wonder how we of this generation could have allowed such a thing to happen.
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The Obama Administration therefore has embarked on a costly effort to refurbish and replace a nuclear-weapons arsenal that has seen little modernization since the Cold War ended 20 years ago.
This law also directed a moratorium on U.S. testing after up to fifteen tests were conducted to help prepare the American nuclear arsenal for a permanent cessation of underground detonations.
Today it has just nine, so a single problem with one type could affect a large fraction of the nuclear arsenal.
Cutting the size of the nuclear arsenal to a small fraction of its Cold War size and focusing on terrorists rather than state-based threats may seem sensible in the present environment, but the decisions the administration is making will have consequences for decades after it leaves office.
As for the 450 Minuteman missiles that make up the other land-based leg of the arsenal, their locations are well known and the number of warheads they carry has dwindled to a small portion of the nuclear arsenal, so their future contribution to deterrence is uncertain too.
He made clear we will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons, while retaining a safe, secure, and effective arsenal as long as we still need it.
Obama's article, "Breaking the war mentality, " was ostensibly a feature story showcasing two student organizations that advocated a freeze in the US's nuclear arsenal.
He directed a Nuclear Policy Review that committed the government to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national strategy, scaling back the size of the strategic arsenal, and continuing a 20-year moratorium on production of new nuclear warheads.
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Still more dangerously, by treating nuclear weapons as just another explosive in the arsenal, rather than as a deterrent weapon of last resort, America would dangerously blur the line against nuclear use by anyone.
Where the guide fails to provide details, however, the administration's actions regarding America's nuclear arsenal emphasize reductions rather than maintaining a strong deterrent.
In other words, the Russians are going to undergo a substantial contraction in the size of its strategic nuclear arsenal, whether we do or not.
In an interview with the BBC, Musharraf warned that a "disturbed environment" might bring in dangerous elements that could pose a risk to Pakistan's control over its nuclear arsenal.
The stated rationale was to permit an orderly transition on the part of the nuclear arsenal and its supporting industrial establishment to a permanent no-testing environment.
America has also been pruning the weapons held in reserve for spares: its nuclear arsenal will by 2012 be less than a quarter its size at the end of the cold war.
The key to effective nuclear deterrence was a secure retaliatory capability, meaning an arsenal that could ride out any surprise attack and then respond with such devastating effect that adversaries would find the prospect unacceptable.
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If the renewal is a success, it will leave Russia less reliant on the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the USSR.
It has been a nuclear power for some time, but this has imposed a huge burden on its defense budget, not least in keeping the nuclear arsenal secure from terrorists.
Kerry and the Chinese foreign policy chief, State Councilor Yang Jiechi, said the two nations would work together to create a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, effectively forcing North Korea to give up its arsenal.
Although Obama received enthusiastic applause from his audience in Prague when he announced his intention to destroy the US's nuclear arsenal, drastically scale back its missile defense programs and forge a new alliance with Russia, his words were anything but music to the ears of the leaders of former Soviet satellites threatened by Russia.
The Base Force proposed a 25 percent reduction in conventional forces and reductions in the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal.
They also noted the deployment of Russia's most advanced S-400 air defence system in Belarus and a parallel drill conducted by the Strategic Rocket Forces, the guardians of the Kremlin's nuclear arsenal.
Yet the Obama administration seems to think that while Soviet leaders were deterred from using their massive arsenal, the Iranians and the North Koreans might not be deterred from using a nuclear force of no more than a handful of weapons at best.
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