J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, once warned that nuclear rivalry was like “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
Today, the best metaphor is darker and more literal: a house of dynamite. The phrase, recently popularized by the Netflix movie, captures the risky reality in which we’re now operating.
On Feb. 5, the treaty known as New START lapsed, eliminating the last legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals — the United States and Russia.
This comes as China continues a massive buildup of their arsenal, and North Korea pursues more effective ballistic missiles to carry their nuclear warheads farther.
The house of dynamite is getting larger and less stable, and the last guardrails are now gone. If we want our children and grandchildren to inherit a planet with less risk of nuclear conflict than we had, then that must change.
There is one camp of experts who will tell you that arms control is dead, a relic of the past.
For those people, the solution is easy: Build more, better bombs and delivery systems that are harder to stop so that our enemies know any nuclear threat will be met with unacceptable costs.
That approach does reinforce deterrence, but the U.S. already possesses that ability with the current arsenal. It also costs billions of dollars to maintain and modernize an even larger and more complex program. Not to mention, doing so would increase the risk that one false move could unleash nuclear weapons capable of destroying the world many times over.
A second camp advocates nuclear restraint and arms control, aiming to reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict by limiting the number of weapons themselves.
However, in a world where multiple countries see nuclear buildup as existential to their security, getting all of them moving in lockstep toward arms control is a massive challenge.
And then there’s the third camp, led by President Donald Trump, who thinks he can throw hundreds of billions of dollars at a missile defense system he calls the Golden Dome and insulate the country from all risk of nuclear weapons.
But there is no guarantee this would work. When it comes to nuclear weapons, the physics favors the offense — who can continue developing their delivery systems, use more complex decoys and only need a small percentage of their warheads to get through to cause unthinkable destruction.
Even just attempting to build an impermeable shield would likely spur adversaries to expand their arsenals to overcome it, leading to an even more dangerous reality.
This entire debate is often framed as a choice between deterrence and arms control, but what we’ve seen in the real world suggests stability and preventing disaster depends on both.
A strong, flexible and credible nuclear deterrent combined with thoughtful arms control are the two pillars that have kept our house of dynamite from detonating.
New START is a great example of this approach.
