-There's been a lot of talk about the status
of the United States' nuclear weapons.
Their great power.
-They will be met with fire and fury.
-Their dire need for improvements.
-We have let our nuclear capabilities atrophy.
-And everything in between.
But what exactly makes up the United States' nuclear forces?
And how do they compare to the rest of the world?
-Nuclear weapons are in a completely different category
than conventional weapons.
Depending on the country,
they structure themselves differently,
depending on what they think is necessary.
-So, let's start with the weapons themselves.
The atomic bomb and its more powerful sibling,
the hydrogen bomb,
both use uranium or plutonium to spark a nuclear reaction,
or a chain of reactions.
The yield of these bombs, or how big their explosions are,
has grown enormously since the first nuclear tests.
-The first nuclear weapons that were used by
the United States back in 1945 had a yield of 15,
the first one, and 20, the second one -- 20 kilotons.
And that's the explosive power equivalent of 20,000 tons
of TNT explosives going off in one bomb.
In the early phases, that was almost like a race
to see how powerful you could build them.
Very quickly, you got into the hundreds of kilotons.
Then you ended up in the megaton.
And in theory, you could continue to make weapons more
and more powerful, but very quickly,
it became evident that it wasn't very useful
because what do you get for that?
Well, you get a lot of destruction,
a lot of radioactive fallout that's gonna drift everywhere,
and you can destroy so many things so many times over,
but so what?
So, gradually, as delivery systems got more accurate,
they could turn down the yield, the power of the weapons.
-The US nuclear stockpile today has high-
and low-yield warheads,
ranging from the B-83, which has a yield of 1.
2 megatons, to the B-61,
which has a yield that can go as low as 0.
3 kilotons.
And as the explosive power of the bombs
themselves was rising and falling,
so was the number of warheads the countries had.
-You have an insane production of nuclear weapons
happening through the '50s and '60s.
At the peak, the total number of weapons
was on the order of 17,000 weapons.
The Cold War had gone nuts.
Since the end of the Cold War,
the trend has been very consistent going south --
fewer and fewer nuclear weapons.
Now it's sort of leavening out a bit, where it is
as if the nuclear weapons states
are sort of slowing down the disarmament process.
-Right now there's about 15,000 nuclear weapons
in nine countries' stockpiles around the world.
And even that is still enough to flatten dozens of cities,
destroy crucial ecosystems, and kill millions.
The smallest arsenal, according to Kristensen's estimates,
belongs to North Korea.
-Their arsenal right now is very -- It's immature.
It's building in capacity.
-The largest arsenals still belong to the Cold War rivals,
but those massive arsenals of nuclear bombs
are only one part of the country's nuclear forces.
Another crucial part are the delivery systems
for those weapons,
which is how countries launch bombs to their intended targets.
That's where the nuclear triad comes in.
You may have heard it mentioned before.
-The three legs of the triad, though --
Do you have a priority?
'Cause I want to go to Senator Rubio after that and ask him.
-I think -- I think, to me, nuclear's just the --
the power -- the devastation is very important to me.
-It's a three-pronged military force structure
to launch nuclear weapons developed during the Cold War
and still maintained by the US and Russia.
The triad is supposed to ensure
that some of a nation's nuclear weapons
could survive a first-strike attack
and launch a successful second strike back
at the attacking nation.
All these delivery systems and warheads
need a big support apparatus.
There's the infrastructure to build, maintain,
and modernize nuclear weapons,
management and education processes,
so people know how to operate them,
command and control systems
to keep them in a state of readiness, oversight mechanisms,
and declaratory government policy about when to use them.
And it gets costly.
The US already directs about 5.
5% of its defense budget just toward its nuclear forces.
And the cost is expected to rise
with the arsenal's modernization needs
and could swallow up to 8% of defense
spending by the late 2020s.
-The current modernization program,
to the best we can see, is not sustainable economically.
So we would have to cut some conventional programs
and use that on nuclear instead.
And that's a huge dilemma inside military planning.
-But international tensions are on the rise along with costs,
as flare-ups with Russia become more commonplace
and volatile threats are exchanged with North Korea.
The US will have to make tough decisions
about its nuclear priorities, and soon.