January 18, 2022
Nuclear Weapons, China, and a Strategic Defense Initiative for this Century
A modern strategy for addressing the threats we now confront must be conceptually similar to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and draw from the lessons it conveyed. It must also maintain the sufficiency of our triad and apply technologically advanced answers to the array of new threats we face.
by Michael R. Pompeo
In 2019, I was honored to receive the Hudson Institute’s Herman Kahn Award. Herman Kahn, the esteemed physicist, strategist, and futurist, founded the Hudson Institute. No book is more aptly titled than Kahn’s Thinking about the Unthinkable, published in 1962.
Kahn forced American strategists, our military, and our political leaders to confront issues that are supremely important, but, in equal measure, repellent. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to confront our nation’s strategic threats and options.
At Los Alamos in 1946, Dr. Louis Slotin placed pieces of fissile material near each other to calculate critical mass. Slotin died from a fatal dose of radiation.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/nuclear-weapons-china-and-strategic-defense-initiative-century-199549
