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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Well there's a reason there are safeguards agreements and inspections. The idea is a slow mutual drawdown and then eventually a rapid final disarmament once a critical low threshold is reached.

You can maintain the safeguards and inspections indefinitely via the IAEA.

https://www.ctbto.org/verification-regime/

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But then it becomes a race to create the technology that can build nuclear weapons the fastest creating a more volatile equilibrium.

That's a good point but I suspect the feasibility of this approach depends on having large facilities and uranium procurement operations. These are things that can be regulated. You can see this in the Iran situation where their "breakout time" is measurable. With nations willing to negotiate, this could be brought under control. However, tbh I think they probably should have a deterrent as they are facing a serious invasion threat by nuclear armed powers. The world needs to scale down in tandem, not weaker parties first and stronger parties later.

not just fast manufacture times but replace many smaller yeild weapons but newer high yield weapons to keep the numbers in the agreed range but not actually reducing your damage potential.

You can make maximum yields part of your agreements. Of note though, the US during the Obama years improved the accuracy of submarine launched missiles which greatly improved the damage potential while staying in the agreed ranges. This was because fewer nukes would be needed per a target so overall damage could be increased.

For an example of this type of thing, see slide 11 (which refers to air dropped munitions rather than SLBMs): https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Brief2017_Italy2....

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