In the last year of the Cold War,75 Herbert York cited Bundy’s statement in a talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (of which he had been the first director), where, along with Los Alamos, all U.S. nuclear weapons had been designed. York posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? Concurring with Bundy’s judgment—as who would not?—he answered his question, “somewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100 … closer to 1 than it is to 100.”
