Into the void created by the Trump administration’s decision to let the New START Treaty expire on Feb. 5—which Treaty limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads for Russia and the United States to 1,550 each— a bevy of proposals has come forward. One would have the United States build the Golden Dome layered anti-missile defense shield. However, perhaps the most alarming proposal is that put forward by the Heritage Foundation: For the U.S. to roughly triple its deployable nuclear weapons arsenal for attacks principally against China and Russia, which could quickly trigger nuclear World War III.
Robert Peters, the Heritage Foundation’s Research Fellow for Strategic Deterrence and its leading authority on nuclear conflict, authored on Oct. 3, 2025, a Heritage Foundation special report, “The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal of 2050: A Proposal for American Survival.” It argues:
“The United States maintains a strategic deterrent that is insufficient for the current degrading security environment, much less an unknown and potentially far worse security environment of the coming half-century. For this reason, the United States should increase its strategic arsenal significantly, while also rebuilding its largely ossified non-strategic nuclear arsenal.” Peters continued, “To this end, this Backgrounder recommends that by 2050, the United States should field a strategic arsenal of roughly 3,500 operationally deployed strategic weapons and a non-strategic arsenal of 1,125 operationally deployed weapons deployed across three theaters for a new total of roughly 4,625 operationally deployed nuclear weapons.”
This proposal would triple the United States’ deployable nuclear weapons. Some of the increase may be achieved by equipping missiles with additional warheads that had been reduced to a single warhead under the New START Treaty. Apparently, the increase in the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal will also be satisfied by the U.S. production of new missiles.
