As with guns, Americans are divided on the issue of nuclear weapons. One side is motivated by a "more is better" philosophy — a deep, intuitive belief that the best way to stop bad guys is to get more weapons to the good guys. On the other side are those who think we'd be safer with fewer weapons — and not just because of the risk of conflict. After all, as a country's nuclear arsenal grows, so too does the chance of accidents.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump seemed to endorse the "more is better" view in his recent tweet saying that America needs to "strengthen and expand its nuclear capability." It's a view that's shared by at least one professor of government, as well as Republicans in Congress, who, under the Obama administration, made "modernizing" U.S. nuclear forces a condition for approving the New START Treaty, the latest arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia.
But scientists tend to agree with the less-is-safer philosophy. Some are guided by more than intuition, having spent careers studying what would happen following the exchange of modern nuclear weapons — bombs vastly more powerful than those the United States dropped on Japan in World War II.