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U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised questions about the sustainability of the United States' nuclear deterrent.

The world press was abuzz on Wednesday with the news of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ speech about nuclear weapons at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Oct. 28. In short, he raised the usual concerns about old, potentially unaccounted-for Soviet warheads and offered his support for another extremely loose strategic arms agreement with the Kremlin modeled on the Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty signed in Moscow in 2002. He also affirmed the United States’ commitment to maintaining its nuclear deterrent but raised serious questions about its long-term sustainability. It was this point that raised perhaps the most eyebrows.

The question of sustainability has its root in the post-Cold War realities of nuclear warhead design. During the Cold War, the intensity of the nuclear arms race between Washington and Moscow was ferocious. Both sides kept their arsenals on a hair-trigger alert lest a surprise first strike wipe out their retaliatory capacity. Weapons were designed to be as light and as destructive as possible (maximizing what is known as yield-to-weight ratio). These designs were regularly subjected to full-scale nuclear tests and were predictably outmoded by newer warheads as a matter of course within around a decade. With a few exceptions, the United States and the Soviet Union conducted around 10 tests — and often many more than that — per year from the 1960s until the Soviet Union’s collapse.