William Perry on Stanford Uni Blog 15.8.2015
"On my seventeenth birthday in October 1944, I drove to Pittsburgh, passed the exams for the Army Air Cadet program, and was sworn in, but months later the Air Cadet program was discontinued. After completing a few semesters of college, I enlisted in the Army Engineers. The army trained me in map-making and assigned me to the Army of Occupation of Japan, where I was sent to a base outside Tokyo for training."
"William J. Perry was the 19th Secretary of Defense for the United States from February 1994 to January 1997. He previously served as Deputy Secretary of Defense and as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. He is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University and author of My Journey at the Nuclear Brink."
February 2, 1998 National Press Club nuclear abolition, deterrence
Retired General Lee Butler was the first U.S. commander of U.S. nuclear forces to ever call for their abolition. He talked about his place in the U.S. strategic planning for nuclear war and then described his abhorrence of using nuclear weapons and the effects of such use. He felt that the U.S. should use its powerful place in the world to set the example for abolishing nuclear weapons. After his prepared remarks he took questions from the audience.
"As a result of investments made under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, NNSA was able to deliver more than 200 upgraded nuclear weapons to the Department of Defense last year. This is our largest delivery in one year since the end of the Cold War," Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), said at the breakfast of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies "Peace through Strength."
Newsweek 29.11.23: A new nuclear warhead has been approved and cleared for use in a variety of U.S. aircraft, notably the B-2A Spirit bomber. The warhead is part of continuing efforts to modernize the nation's nuclear stockpile for military use.
Spirit will be the first domestic combat aircraft to employ the B61-12 nuclear bomb, unveiled Monday as part of the 335-page unclassified Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP), a report for the 2024 fiscal year by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The latter works within the Department of Energy (DOE) and designs, produces, delivers and certifies the nation's nuclear stockpile for military operation.
In October, the House of Representatives approved a resolution to increase defense spending in fiscal year 2024 by about $1.11 billion over the current fiscal year—including $19.114 billion for the continued modernization of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile and infrastructure and $1.946 billion for naval warships.
Russia, the United States and China have all built new facilities and dug new tunnels at their nuclear test sites in recent years, satellite images obtained exclusively by CNN show, at a time when tensions between the three major nuclear powers have risen to their highest in decades.
A near-disaster at a federal nuclear weapons laboratory takes a hidden toll on America's arsenal
Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads
there Admiral Charles Richard was in April this year, with his siren calls, urging the US Senate to consider a simple proposition. “Sustainment of modernization of our modern nuclear forces … has transitioned from something we should do, to something we must do.” As Commander of the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), he was aching to impress the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the nuclear deterrent was there to be polished and improved.
“The real differentiator here is the acquisition strategy, with a lot of competition -- a lot of ‘fly before you buy’ -- built in,” CSIS' Tom Karako says. “The relatively longer NGI development timeline for homeland ballistic missile defense can be mitigated by near-term improvements” in ground missile defense.
The Atlantic Council has printed a 26,000-word anonymous report laying a strategy for the US to combat China, including regime change.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | 3 feb.
The head of Strategic Command announced the United States must prepare for the “very real possibility” of nuclear war with China or Russia.
By Subrata Ghoshroy, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. October 6, 2020
In July, both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed their own versions of a defense authorization bill for 2021. By a wide majority, both chambers authorized more than $740 billion for defense spending next year. Tucked away in the Senate bill was $20.3 billion for missile defense, and that funding could make it into the final version that lands on the president’s desk. While $20.3 billion may not seem significant in a $740 billion budget, it is nevertheless a startling figure. What’s more, US taxpayers have invested nearly $200 billion on missile defense in the past two decades and another $100 billion in the decade before, with little to show for it.
Hans M. Kristensen & alios i Bulletin of the Atoic Scientists
Ingress: "The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike."
Hagel announces reforms of U.S. nuclear forces---U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Friday announced an action plan to reform the country's military nuclear enterprise and called for additional investments in sustainment as well as measures to raise the morale of the nuclear forces.
The NPR explicitly rejects reducing the high-alert status of ICBMs and strategic submarines (SSBNs), concluding that “the current alert posture of U.S. strategic forces - with heavy bombers off full-time alert, nearly all ICBMs on alert, and a significant