This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 30th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Nuclear weapons figure prominently in power competition among states across the globe and it's hard

to overstate the importance of getting nuclear policy right.

Eric Gomez and Carolyn Dormony are editors of a new Cato volume, America's Nuclear Crossroads.

We spoke last week.

The United States has, for a long time, had been totally dominant with respect to nuclear

weapons, and there has to be a lot of concern among voters in particular that that might not be the case in the future.

Why or why not should they be concerned about it?

Well, the idea of nuclear numbers mattering the most, which was again one of these vestiges of the Cold War where there was a lot of focus on the US and Soviet Union matching each other in terms of quantity of warheads or missiles or what have you.

Based off of the ways that different tools can come into the deterrence picture and the way that different technologies are starting

to have an impact on international relations, generally speaking, but also conflict, more narrowly speaking. I think that worrying about who's number one in terms of warhead count doesn't really capture the realities of what we're dealing with today in terms of the challenges the United States faces and the types of threats that other countries

pose to us.

I think this is particularly pertinent with respect to my chapter on the nuclear modernization plan and our annual budgets, to be quite

honest, because one of the things that voters tend to care about more is how their money is actually being used.

Is it going to affect their local communities?

Is that money going back into the things that actually change their day-to-day lives or is it going

into a large Pentagon bureaucracy that is not necessarily investing their dollars in the most

sound and sustainable way possible.

And so one of the things that I look at specifically

is over the next 30 years, we're set to spend

1.7 trillion dollars of taxpayer money updating the nuclear arsenal.

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