An innovation in US nuclear forces triples “the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces.” The combination of a lack of Russian situational awareness, dangerously short warning times, high-readiness alert postures, and this increased US strike capacity has created a deeply destabilizing and dangerous strategic nuclear situation. / …
Doomsday Clock – By Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons “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.….Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target….
![By Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://neue-entspannungspolitik.berlin/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Doomsday_Clock-_2.5_minutes.svg_1024x1024.png)
