This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 27th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How do we get three separate ways of launching nuclear weapons?

Why does it matter that we should move to fewer such

platforms? Ben Friedman is co-author of the new Cato paper The End of Overkill, reassessing

US nuclear weapons policy. He argues that there are significant savings to be reaped at no loss to security

The United States now has about

1600 deployed nuclear weapons on three kinds of delivery systems, submarine-launched ballistic

missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, and bomber aircraft, gravity bombs.

And we argue that that's unnecessary that we could get by with

submarine-launched ballistic missiles alone and still accomplish all the

aims we have for nukes in the U.S. foreign policy today.

We don't necessarily agree with all those aims,

but we're saying just on efficiency grounds,

you could be a very hawkish person

and agree with us that we don't need all these systems.

And we argue that the triad developed

from bureaucratic competition among the military services, the Navy and the Air Force in particular

and survived because that competition diminished and these arguments for it were sort of invented to justify it.

It wasn't strategically oriented in the first place.

It was sort of something that happened bureaucratically and then was justified for a variety

of reasons involving allies and bureaucratic compromise, and it was never actually necessary for the reasons people said during the Cold War and has become especially unnecessarily and wasteful now.

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