Should we still be testing nuclear bombs?

[Baggers]

Why do we need to test new Nuclear bombs? Why would we need to blow up the planet eleven times instead of ten? The US has enough nuclear firepower to blow up all the land on earth multiple times. So we're done. Put the money in the schools and the roads already.

As was stated earlier, nuclear weapons have a definite shelf life and as they get older, the fissle materials lose their efficiency. Unless they pull one from time to time and test it, they have no way of knowing if the rest of that particular series of weapons will perform as originally designed. We haven't tested any of ours in years and we need to know if what we have is still functional.

And contrary to popular belief, the US does not have enough firepower to blow up the Earth. That's always been one of the great canards of the anti-nuclear crowd since the sixties. Ever since the end of the Cold War, we've been dismantling weapons at a dramatic pace. The days of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) are long gone. What's left of our nuclear arsenal is aging, and must be updated and modernized to cope with modern threats.

Cheers!

 

[catsmeow]

No. I'm not keen on it. Especially when the French were testing in the pacific a few years back (I'm in Australia). It destroyed the ecosystem in that region and causes problems environmentally.