Just a year after signing a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, President Obama wants more drastic cuts to America’s nuclear arsenal. This should come as no surprise to anybody who paid attention to his April 2009 speech in Prague. Obama said that the United States would take concrete steps toward “a world without nuclear weapons,” while merely urging “others to do the same.” Apparently, Obama doesn’t put stock in the Reagan maxim that, especially in strategic nuclear weaponry, America should always “trust, but verify.”
In that same speech, Obama claimed the threat of nuclear war has decreased in recent years but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up, citing proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction and terrorists’ determination to obtain them. Still, he said we should divorce American national defense strategy from nuclear weapons, while hoping other members of the club would follow suit. This is called “cognitive dissonance,” the ability to believe two contradictory things simultaneously. Liberals see it as evidence of intellectual sophistication. Realists see it as magical thinking.
