Obama’s Dangerous Irony
by Rob Schwarzwalder
April 13, 2010
“Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history,” said President Obama today in a major foreign policy address. “The risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up.”
The President was speaking to the assembled leaders of 47 countries, gathered in Washington, DC to discuss ways of averting nuclear terrorism. His point is a good one: There’s a lot of nuclear material floating around, and it’s imperative that for the security of the United States and our allies America take the lead in preventing it from falling into the hands of terrorists and evildoers generally.
Yet the President, who said last year in Prague and reaffirmed today that he wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons, seems unmindful of two salient facts:
(1) We cannot dis-invent nuclear weapons. The technology exists. It is fairly simple to obtain. Thus, we will never rid the world of nuclear weapons any more than we will rid the world of sin. We must therefore remain vigilant, never – ever – relaxing the exhausting, expensive and intensive efforts of our intelligence agencies and armed forces to prevent the spread and use of nuclear devices.
(2) By cutting too deeply into our nuclear arsenal, we invite the very thing we wish to avoid: Nuclear confrontation. As former UN Ambassador and distinguished security policy expert John Bolton has noted, “President Obama has to date failed to articulate any coherent strategic rationale for the substantial cuts in nuclear weapons and delivery systems he agreed to … with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.” Instead, Mr. Obama has eliminated the leading-edge F-22 aircraft, limited funds to test our existing nuclear weapons and eliminated the missile defenses both Poland and Czechoslovakia had agreed to host on their soil.
Wishful thinking is no substitute for sound policy. Although Mr. Obama’s efforts at this week’s conference might be noble, the extent to which they are uninformed by wisdom makes them all the more dangerous for the security and vital interests of the United States.
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By: Tyler Wigg-Stevenson | April 26, 2010 at 2:01 pm
With respect, this blog post seems unmindful and ill-informed regarding a number of salient facts in the current debate about nuclear weapons.
1) Nobody contends that nuclear weapons can be uninvented. The technology, while more difficult to obtain than this post makes it seem to be, is and will continue to be — to greater and lesser degrees — available. What makes nuclear weapons different from guns, drugs, etc., however, are their inherently fragile supply chain. Nuclear weapons can only be constructed with highly enriched uranium and plutonium; neither is found in nature, and both require large-scale industrial efforts to produce. So it is simply and patently false to say that nuclear weapons can no more be abolished than can human sin; the former require factories that can be seen from space (and thus verifiably monitored, given sufficient political will) while the latter requires only an ever-deceitful human heart (Jer. 17.9).
2) The author’s second point simply isn’t true. The coherent strategic rationale for the cuts under the new START treaty is that there is no strategic value for the Cold War levels of arsenals that we currently have (and, indeed, which the conservative New START will maintain). Going down to 1,550 nuclear weapons per side is hardly unilateral disarmament; it simply continues the process started by Presidents Reagan and Bush. It’s disingenuous to cite Amb. Bolton as a credible critic of the New START; Amb. Bolton has never met a treaty he didn’t hate. And when publications like Strategic Studies Quarterly — hardly an abolitionist rag — suggest that the U.S. could unilaterally reduce its arsenal to about 300 nuclear weapons without compromising its strategic stability, Amb. Bolton’s critiques are revealed as ideologically driven, rather than prudential. (http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2010/spring/forsythsaltzmanschaub.pdf)
On the point made about missile defense: it has been moved, not eliminated, so as better to address a possible Iranian threat.
And F-22s have nothing to do with nuclear weapons, so this point is better reserved for a broader discussion of defense spending.
Rob Schwarzwalder is correct that we should be unceasingly diligent in our intelligence efforts regarding nuclear security. Intelligence is only one part, however, of a comprehensive approach to nuclear security in our post-9/11 era. Nor are the President’s current actions truly his own idea. Our security elite from both parties — led by respected realists like George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, who have not made careers and reputations by advancing specious and naive ideas — have said we need a new approach to 21st century nuclear security, and that our vital national interest requires the decades-long pursuit of zero nuclear weapons. President Obama has adopted proposals embraced by a supermajority of our living, former Secretaries of State, Defense, and National Security Advisors; it is their wisdom that is the foundation for current White House actions. (see: http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/6731276.html)
A question for FRC: though this blog post lines up with the talking points of President Obama’s likely opponents in the 2012 election, it seems almost wholly divorced from any good-faith, substantive understanding of the prudential arguments being made around nuclear security in an age of international terrorism. So I’m curious: what possible stake could the Family Research Council have in this debate? And from where, specifically, does the FRC claim the technical competency to address these issues?
I ask this because our nuclear security is simply too important to want the President to fail. So even if one’s most fervent wish, based on domestic political issues, is to have the current President be a one-termer, we should all pray, for all our sakes (1 Tim 2.1-3), that while he holds the reins of power he at least gets the nuclear issue right. And if the best non-partisan, reality-based judgments about nuclear security are any indicator, it seems that we’re at least moving in the right direction.