Weapons

Editorial: Aging nuclear weapons arsenal needs to be modernized

The head of the U.S. Strategic Command and Nebraska’s senior U.S. senator are framing things sensibly when it comes to our nuclear weapons arsenal. The key need isn’t to increase the number of our nuclear warheads but, instead, to modernize our weapons to maintain a strong deterrent capability.

Gen. John Hyten, who heads StratCom, and Sen. Deb Fischer, the new chairwoman of the Senate’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee, made those points recently to The World-Herald’s Steve Liewer.

Liewer looked at U.S. nuclear weapons policy in the wake of President Donald Trump’s statement that the United States has “fallen behind on nuclear weapons capacity” and that he wants to make sure that our country is at the “top of the pack.”