Nuclear Doubts in the House

During the Cold War, fear deterred the United States and the Soviet Union from all-out nuclear warfare, and today it makes the prevention of nuclear conflict a chief objective of American foreign policy. However, according to this opinion in The New York Times, a new bill in the US House of Representatives threatens to lower the psychological threshold for nuclear war, a particularly risky proposition at a time when countries like Pakistan, India, and probably North Korea have added nuclear weapons to their arsenals. The bill would provide financing for a new generation of nuclear weapons less powerful than those built during the Cold War but designed to penetrate underground command centers or for use in regional conflicts. "The plan threatens to blur the line between nuclear and conventional arms," the author concludes, arguing that legislators of both parties should resist calls to fund research on the so-called 'mini-nukes'. – YaleGlobal