This paper describes how, over the past two decades, the usefulness of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that are forward-deployed in Europe has gradually declined, and it explains the logic behind their decreased importance.

For decades, there has been an intense debate over the best approach to managing spent fuel from nuclear power reactors, whether it is better to dispose of it directly in geologic repositories, or reprocess it to recover and recycle the plutonium and uranium, disposing only of the wastes from reprocessing and recycling.