Common belief holds that nuclear weapons are horrible weapons that have no place on the face of the Earth. It also holds that the path to peace and prosperity as a global community includes the disarmament of these weapons. The majority of Americans today will tell you that having a large arsenal of nuclear weapons is pointless, because we will never fire all of those weapons. However, I can tell you that all of these ideas are untrue.

The nuclear missile is the most powerful weapon ever created by mankind, and is so powerful that it is one of the main factors that are considered when judging a nation’s military strength. Having an arsenal of nuclear weapons that is many times larger than the other nations of the world is essential to preserve America’s positive influence on the rest of the world, and it prevents our enemies from attacking us and our allies. Maintaining a large arsenal of these weapons will help keep peace in the world, because no nation would want to antagonize a nation that has the capacity to obliterate them tenfold. Nuclear weapons are not simply tools of warfare and weapons of destruction; they are tools of negotiation and weapons to maintain our freedoms.

"The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs." We can learn from these wise words from Richard Nixon, a president that valiantly fought our Cold War against the Soviet Union, that the purpose of having so many nuclear warheads is not only just to maintain military superiority, but to have very powerful negotiating power. An overwhelmingly strong arsenal/military provides a great amount of leverage over your enemies, and leverage is something we desperately need in today’s day and age. We are currently sixteen trillion dollars in debt, and 1.17 trillion dollars of that debt belongs to China, a nation that we cannot trust. As China is rapidly gaining economic leverage over us, it is unspeakably important that we maintain our military and our nuclear arsenal.

In 2010, our nuclear arsenal was at the suitable amount of 5,113 nuclear warheads, far above the amount of warheads our rivals had. Now, thanks to action from President Obama that congress had never approved, we have merely 1,700 nuclear warheads, even less than our rival, Russia. Obama wants to reduce our nuclear arsenal even further to 1,100 warheads, putting us in even greater danger of being attacked by an aggressive nation not unlike North Korea, or Iran once they have nuclear capability. In order to ensure our security and our ideals are never in grave danger, in a world that is more dangerous than it was yesterday, we need to maintain and revamp our stockpile to ensure the voice of freedom never dies away.