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.

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Since 1981 we've been committed to seeking fair and verifiable arms agreements that would lower the risk of war and reduce the size of nuclear arsenals.

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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.

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If an aggressor launches a nuclear device of whatever size and detonates it above the atmosphere and in the line of site of its target country, the x-rays and gamma rays emitted by the blast will cause an electromagnetic pulse, or wave a million times stronger than the strongest radio wave.

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Defense officials and nuclear policy experts said the Pentagon supported the White House's desire to cut as much as a third to the size of the nuclear stockpile.

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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.

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Even if, against all odds, the Kremlin were to agree to curbs on tactical nuclear weapons, their relatively small size and ease of portability means that any such limitations would be inherently unverifiable.

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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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In today's world -- to say nothing of tomorrow's -- these are going to be driven by more multifaceted considerations than simply the size of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy

Joseph De Trani, former head of the National Counterproliferation Center, predicted U.S. intelligence would determine the size and composition of the nuclear device in one to three days based partly on radioactive elements released into the environment.

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But "as our party grew in size, many of us began to see nuclear power as a safe power that should be more aggressively utilized, " he said.

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Fears of a German invasion of New York were improbable, if not utterly fantastic, but in a pre-nuclear weapon, pre-smart weapon age, the size of a navy really mattered.

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"We can and will change the size, the composition, the character of our nuclear forces in a way that reflects the reality that the Cold War is over, " Bush said.

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The size and composition of the current U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile have been determined by a number of relevant factors over time.

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The once-mighty Vladivostok fleet, for example, is a tenth its former size, says Sergei Khromykh, a former senior officer on a nuclear armed destroyer who now runs a travel agency.

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Hitting the earth at 28, 000 mph an asteroid the size and mass of Apophis would pack the energy of 58, 000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs.

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