Following up on the earlier post, I am among the camp who finds it completely idiotic that the US is urging other countries to stop testing and destroy their arsenals, while harbouring Cold War level stockpiles of nuclear warheads. This is a situation which completely goes against all the common sense that could possibly exist in the world. Think about it; 14, 000 warheads, each with at least a hundred times more force than the Hiroshima bomb, all sitting in armed silos, purely for deterrence purposes. I think that this word was so abused during the period that it completely lost its meaning. 14000 warheads completely change the paradigm. This has nothing at all to do with detrrence. Even if they needed to blow Russia out of orbit, they would never have required more than a hundred warheads. What is the meaning of 14000 of them? I completely fail to grasp, how, some of the most intelligent administrators in the world could resort to such outlandish machinations. At the peak of the cold war, six warheads were being built per day! It was complete nonesense (Even with all the paranoia)

Tragically, as far as I know, there been no efforts to destroy even half of these, at a time when their utility is essentially non-existent (Well, it was non-existent even during that time, but then the Cold War always was a good excuse). Before sending out supposedly beneficient message, the US should get rid of its perversely excessive silos. And this is not an opinion enumerated only by left-liberals. I remember that John Deutch, director of the CIA during the Clinton administration, took the same stand in Foreign Affairs probably the leading mainstream right-wing magazine in the US. He says:
"Countering the proliferation of nuclear weapons--by slowing the spread of nuclear capabilities among states, assuring that nuclear devices do not get into the hands of terrorist groups, and protecting existing stockpiles--has become as high a priority as deterring major nuclear attacks.
Unfortunately, the current U.S. nuclear posture does not reflect this shift. Washington still maintains a large nuclear arsenal designed for the Cold War, and it fails to take into account the current impact of its nuclear policies on those of other governments. In fact, with its overwhelming conventional military advantage, the United States does not need nuclear weapons for either war fighting or for deterring conventional war. It should therefore scale back its nuclear activity significantly."

What's the anagram of 'nuclear'? Unclear. That says it all.