Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long; and Matthew Kroenig respond to Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter's summer 2016 article, "Should the United States Reject MAD? Damage Limitation and U.S. Nuclear Strategy toward China."

China's growing nuclear arsenal threatens to erode the United States' damage-limitation capability—its ability to destroy Chinese forces and thereby significantly reduce the damage that an all-out Chinese nuclear attack would inflict on the United States. Nevertheless, the United States should not attempt to preserve this capability. Doing so is technologically infeasible, would not add to the U.S. nuclear deterrent, would heighten tensions with China, and would increase the risk of nuclear escalation in a crisis.

The Economics of Reprocessing Versus Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel

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.

In an exchange of letters, James Lindsay and Michael O’Hanlon claim that in arguing that the costs of a national missile defense outweigh the benefits, the authors underestimate or ignore three possible scenarios that support the development of a limited NMD system. The authors respond.

As the debate on a U.S. national missile defense intensifies, the decision about whether the United States should develop an NMD system seems to be giving way to questions over the type of system to be deployed and its scope: For example, should the United States pursue NMD against Russia or China? What are the possible security benefits and costs of limited NMD? What can the United States do to counter the international political fallout of limited NMD?

Current U.S. nuclear strategy identifies new nuclear counterforce missions as a means of impeding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.