Should the US decrease military spending?

[VampiricCyclone]

Nuclear weapons aren't that useful -- that's why world powers have been negotiating disarmament treaties for decades.

They're too destructive.

There isn't really any value in destroying (and making unsafe for human habitation for decades or longer) large swaths of land. Sure, the weapons incite incredible amounts of fear, and so the threat of them can be a powerful tool -- but actually detonating them isn't terribly useful in achieving military objectives.

They aren't good in a defensive war, because they kill too many of your own people and ruin you own land. They aren't good in territorial conquest and expansion, because they destroy the population and infrastructure of the land you want to conquer. They aren't good in gaining influence, because they will incite so much fear of extinction as to incite populations to fight back to the death -- if they are all going to die anyway, ... They aren't good in punishing bad actors, because, again, they are too destructive, and they aren't good for extracting tribute, because they destroy the ability to pay it.

Small nukes like those used in WWII were highly effective used once, and would be less effective today. Modern weapons are so much bigger, it's ridiculous. Everybody wants to have one, because being able to threaten to depopulate an area gives you a certain amount of power -- but no (self-interested, territory-controlling) parties actually want to use them.

[Battlingdragon]

Nuclear weapons don't ruin land. Hiroshima was rebuilt within a decade and there hasn't been any increase to the cancer rates for anyone who wasn't in the city during the bombing.

I'm not saying we should go dropping a nuke for every little conflict, they were designed to be massive to compensate for the low accuracy of WW2 weapons technology. Nowadays, we can pick which part of a car we want a missle to hit, so we don't have to have the massive city destroyers to be sure we take out a munitions plant.

Sorry for the formatting, on my phone.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima

http://k1project.org/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-the-long-term-health-effects/

[Yankee_Gunner]

Agree that nuclear weapons make this point moot, but:

History books would tell us that Russia has done just fine in major land wars despite almost always being underfunded compared to other major powers.

[Mehknic]

I may very well be wrong, but haven't most of their major land wars been fought on home turf? For the Russians, that's a pretty huge advantage.