Modern Nuclear Warfare for Dummies

As I am writing this, the conservatives in the US, led by the ludicrous members of the Tea Party Movement, are in an uproar. This is not unusual, as they tend to fire up over any change for a more modern, enlightened America.
But this time, the subject is not something small and inconsequential, like sex ed, gay rights or black guys in the oval office. The subject of their most recent rants is the fact that President B. Obama has created new rules and regulations regarding the US nuclear weapons arsenal. His changes are to put restrictions on the US military's license to let those bad boys off the leash and the number of nuclear warheads the US is to have ready.

It seem they believe that with any fewer nukes ready to pound their supposed enemies, the US will be under major attack; nuclear or otherwise, in the very near future. This, of course, is quite insane.
First off, the US has more than enough nuclear weapons to secure its safety from attack by another large nation. There is enough nuclear ordinance in the US arsenals hit every major city in Europe, including Russia. Never mind that most countries in Europe are part of a formal alliance with the US (NATO).
The enemies that might have hit the US with a major nuclear attack are also a thing of the past. The nuclear defense policy that the US has been toting since the 1950s has been based on the thought that a large nation with a radically different system of government (the Soviet Union, in case you were wondering) was going to launch an unprovoked attack. Thus the need for the ability to counter that with a nuclear bombardment of their own. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of a major nuclear attack has fallen away, and with that much of the need for a large strategic nuclear arsenal. I know that being conservative means wanting to live in the past, but the boogeyman is no longer old men sitting in the Kremlin plotting the rise of world communism. Therefore, maintaining a large complement of strategic ICBMs is just a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money, unless you are planning to start something yourselves.

I won't mention the dangers posed by having a lot of nukes sitting around large quantities of rocket fuel around your country.

It is a fact, however that the likelihood of the world experiencing a nuclear attack is greater than it has been for a long time. This threat is not coming from a government, but rather from extra-governmental fighter, rebels and fundamentalists. The fact that such large nuclear arsenals were existing or existed poses one of the greatest threats to the safety of many nations, the US in particular.
Nuclear material, weapons grade or otherwise is available to anyone with the balls and resources to grab them. The greatest threat here I believe comes from extremists operating in the former USSR. There are great deposits of irradiated material, and a level of corruption that makes it easier to steal such materials, for their own use or for resale. But of course, this could also be stolen from the US arsenals by operatives with the right preparations.
Even if you don't have weapons grade material and a nuclear technician you can still cause thousands of deaths and injuries in an urban area with a dirty bomb. For those of you who don't know, a dirty bomb is a conventional bomb that scatters irradiated materials over an area. Radiation poisoning would kill more people than the detonation itself, and the area that was hit would have to be closed off for a long time for decontamination. The recent attacks in Russia, horrible as they were, would have been a hundred times worse if the bombs used there were dirty.

I applaud Barack Obama for his work to reduce the number of operational nuclear weapons, and his willingness to bury past paranoia in cooperating with his counterpart in Russia on disarmament plans. That is the kind of thing he got the Nobel Prize for.
The conflicts of the future are not the kind that can be won with the use of strategic nuclear weapons. Those conflicts never existed, and it is time that the people who insist on living in the past realize this, before it's too late.