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Post by m52nickerson on May 4, 2010 16:28:40 GMT -5
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Post by Ian1732 on May 4, 2010 16:30:06 GMT -5
It's still leftovers from our penis-measuring fight with the Soviet Union.
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Post by Dragon Zachski on May 4, 2010 18:13:37 GMT -5
"only"?
That's a scary thought.
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on May 4, 2010 18:52:35 GMT -5
Oh noez, now they can only bomb every country in the world -- including the US -- 26 times. May as well just open the borders and let all the terrorists in, with so little protection.
Seriously, though, 31,000 nukes in the 60s? Wow. That's roughly 160 nukes per country, based on modern borders. Why could you possibly need 5000 of them, let alone over 30,000? Some kind of epic space battle? Bragging rights?
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Post by m52nickerson on May 4, 2010 19:45:26 GMT -5
Maybe..... It's still leftovers from our penis-measuring fight with the Soviet Union.
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Post by Thejebusfire on May 4, 2010 20:37:39 GMT -5
I think it's like having the biggest dick. It's all about bragging rights.
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on May 4, 2010 21:29:40 GMT -5
A penis that you never get to use & sends people running in fear when they see it.
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Post by tiado on May 4, 2010 21:58:00 GMT -5
That was the first thing I said after reading the thread title.
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Post by Mira on May 4, 2010 23:19:50 GMT -5
A penis that you never get to use & sends people running in fear when they see it. Oh, so a lot like mine? Anywho, I'm quite glad that Dr. Obama has decided to finally disclose our stockpile. I do hope that President Medvedev follows suit.
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swordfish
Full Member
Always the Password
Posts: 123
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Post by swordfish on May 5, 2010 2:30:31 GMT -5
There are certain strategic reasons for having so many, though I won't argue that 5,000 is excessive, let alone 30,000.
For one, the US used to do some strange things with nuclear warheads, putting them on infantry mortars, surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and depth charges. These tended to have pretty low yields (i.e. there are conventional weapons more powerful), and there were a lot of them, so that could easily inflate the numbers.
On top of that, there was a lot (a lot) of redundancy, so that if Ivan took out our silos, we still had bombers, and if he took out our bombers we still had submarines, and so on. I don't think the intention was to ever use all of them, but simply to make sure we always had some to use.
But yes, our nuclear penis had to be bigger than the Ruskies' so we still had a lot more than we needed.
As a side note: I imagine a nuclear penis would result in creating crazy mutant babies... or at least some kind of cancer.
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Post by Armand Tanzarian on May 5, 2010 7:43:11 GMT -5
Cue the quotes from Palin and Gulliani about Obama not protecting us enough by reducing the number of nukes.
Because I cba to look for them right now.
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Post by MaybeNever on May 5, 2010 13:57:14 GMT -5
At least it isn't over 9000.
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Post by unskilled78 on May 5, 2010 14:04:48 GMT -5
I'm going to laugh when we get invade by aliens and it turns out we would have won, had we had those 26,122 nukes. Especially if Obama turns out to have been sent by the aliens for just that reason.
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Post by Dragon Zachski on May 5, 2010 14:22:30 GMT -5
Honestly, if we needed that many nukes to fight off the aliens, we'd probably turn the earth into a desert as a result of it. So, either way, we'd be fucked.
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Post by Distind on May 5, 2010 16:29:23 GMT -5
I'm not sure about our stockpile, but we may actually be able to do more damage with the 5113 now than we could with the 30000 then, there have been massive improvements in the power of the weapons since then, depending on how many of the existing weapons are new we may actually be worse off.
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