BURBANK, Calif. — Former National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Jill Hruby said the U.S. government needs to rebuild its understanding of nuclear weapons’ effects as it weighs deterrence in a changing strategic environment involving Russia, China and other nuclear-armed states.
At the third annual Outrider Nuclear Media Summit, held Oct. 22-23 at Warner Bros. Studios, Hruby called for restoring the nation’s “nuclear IQ,” saying “just building a lot of weapons over the long run does not seem like a winning strategy.”
During Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she said, officials in senior government roles had little grasp of how a weapon’s size, detonation location and burst height would affect damage. Those differences matter when considering a proportionate response, Hruby said. She recalled using unclassified tools to explain potential effects.
Hruby said the U.S. cannot deter two nuclear-armed peer adversaries through weapons numbers alone. “If everybody needs the same number of nuclear weapons and there’s two against one, it just doesn’t work,” she said. “There’s no math that makes that work.”
A broader deterrence strategy should include cyber and conventional capabilities, economic ties and direct communication. “We desperately need to talk to each other. We need hotlines,” she said.
Hruby also addressed the need to refurbish an aging U.S. stockpile and rebuild capabilities that had diminished after the Cold War. Responding to criticism from Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, that modernization risks a new arms race, Hruby said officials had not weakened safety, security or environmental standards to speed the work.
On AI regulation, Hruby, who serves on Anthropic’s National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council, questioned whether technical guardrails can adequately manage systems whose behavior is not fully understood. She cautioned that transparency from AI companies is no substitute for meaningful oversight. “We have to be very, very serious about that,” she said.
