Sunday, February 19, 2012

Fumbling the Nuclear Football (From Foreign Policy Magazine)


NOTE: Interesting article from Foreign Policy Magazine on the Obama Administration's painfully slow progress on its efforts to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal...

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Fumbling the Nuclear Football

President Obama finally has a chance to make good on his pledge to rid the world of nuclear weapons. So why is he so afraid of making history?

By James Traub

In the first major foreign-policy speech of his tenure, President Barack Obama told a wildly cheering audience in Prague that the United States would commit itself to "a world without nuclear weapons" and then described in detail the "trajectory" required to get there. In the almost three years since that euphoric moment, the Obama White House has done what it so often does -- forthrightly acknowledge the complexity of its visionary goal, issue nuanced documents that compromise that goal even while reaffirming it, and accept half-measures, then quarter-measures, in the face of utterly unreasonable partisan opposition, surrendering more than planned to get less than expected. 

Obama now has the chance -- perhaps his last chance -- to finally make good on his Prague pledge. He has ordered a review of the U.S. strategic arsenal, to be delivered to him in the coming weeks. The president must decide how many nuclear weapons the United States really needs. Arms control advocates think that this time, finally, Obama will grasp the nettle and accept that the country needs far fewer deployed warheads than the 1,760 or so it now has. I hope he does. But the mottled history of the last three years should give any disarmament advocate pause.
According to the extraordinarily ambitious strategy Obama laid out in Prague, the United States would adopt a new policy to "reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy," pursue arms reduction in treaty negotiations with Russia, pass the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the so-called Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty to control the production of enriched uranium and plutonium, and strengthen the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.


1 comment:

  1. The answer is simple.

    A. He is a Chicago Politician
    B. Who became President (GOP imploded) and
    C. Discovered there are rally bad people out there and prudent decision are needed
    D. and don't make waves, just bucks in election year.

    Catch his Super-Pac promise? Remember the fraud experts at Alacorn?

    He has reneged on a number of promises and blames it on Congress. Congress is REALLY BAD, both sides, but he said he was the man who could bring us together. We voted in a Chicago Politician and we got what we deserved.

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