Hot Air Gets It Wrong On Obama & Nuclear Weapons

Barack Obama ready to slash US nuclear arsenal

Barack Obama has demanded the Pen­ta­gon con­duct a rad­i­cal review of US nuclear weapons doc­trine to pre­pare the way for deep cuts in the country’s arse­nal, the Guardian reveals:

Obama has rejected the Pentagon’s first draft of the “nuclear pos­ture review” as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options con­sis­tent with his goal of even­tu­ally abol­ish­ing nuclear weapons alto­gether, accord­ing to Euro­pean offi­cials. (Pen­ta­gon told to map out rad­i­cal cuts as pres­i­dent pre­pares to chair UN talks).

Hot Air is wor­ried on the grounds that team Obama will give up too much:

We just need to make sure we get firm con­ces­sions and ben­e­fits from any reduc­tions, but the track record of this White House thus far indi­cates we’re much more likely to give away the store. And that would be a seri­ous blow to Amer­i­can cred­i­bil­ity on national and global secu­rity. (Obama to slash nukes: Guardian).

That’s a legit­i­mate con­cern, but I think Obama has his head screwed on straight about this. He’s clearly (I don’t think) advo­cat­ing any­thing like uni­lat­eral dis­ar­ma­ment, and far as his “utopian no-nukes approach,” as ulti­mately unre­al­is­tic as that is, that is the ulti­mate cor­rect atti­tude to have: get rid of as many of them as can safely be accom­plished in a bi– and multi-lateral fashion.

The rea­son hot air and many on the right are uncom­fort­able with Obama aggres­sive dis­ar­ma­ment push is because they get it wrong about where the real nuclear threat is:

Still, in this age, the threat from nuclear weapons comes not so much from the nation states but from ter­ror­ist groups that are their clients, groups that will not be deterred from using them by national stock­piles. (Obama to slash nukes: Guardian).

Hot Air makes the mis­take in think­ing that because the cold war is over, the threat of a large scale global nuclear exchange is over as well. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s far from true, i.e., the threat of an accidental/unintentional  large scale global nuclear exchange is still highly likely:

While most of the fears today are about Iran and North Korea, Ken­nette Benedit, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Bul­letin of Atomic Sci­en­tists says “these are the not the coun­tries, the sys­tems, the weapons that are the real threat.” The real “end of the world” threat comes from the fact that nei­ther the U.S. or Rus­sia have stood down. Their mas­sive strate­gic nuclear world-wide forces are still oper­a­tional, on alert, and in their cold war state of readiness.

Although the Cold War is said to have ended in 1991, the US and Rus­sia each still oper­ate under the assump­tion that the other could autho­rize a nuclear attack against them. The fail­ure to end their Cold War nuclear con­fronta­tion causes both nations to main­tain a total of about 2,600 strate­gic nuclear war­heads on high-alert sta­tus, which can be launched in only a few min­utes, and whose pri­mary mis­sions remain the destruc­tion of the oppos­ing side’s nuclear forces, indus­trial infra­struc­ture, and political/military lead­er­ship.” (Nuclear War ver­sus Con­se­quences of Global Warm­ing).

Acci­den­tal Nuclear War & Its Con­se­quences | A Very Real Possibility

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