If the Obama administration is so insistent on “reseting” Cold War relations, why are they using an outmoded Cold War paradigm for nuclear arms reductions? The major allied nuclear powers — Great Britain, France, the United States — have all steadily reduced both nuclear stockpiles and delivery systems since the end of the Cold War. However, countries aligned against the West — North Korea, Syria, Iran, Russia, and China — have been steadily investing in their strategic arsenals for the past 20 years. There are two types of nuclear non-proliferation, vertical and horizontal. Vertical non-pro deals in limiting internal development of strategic arsenals, to include new nuclear bomb and delivery system designs. Horizontal refers to the transfer of strategic technologies to aspiring nuclear powers, an act proscribed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet most of the nations aligned against Western interests rely or have relied on horizontal assistance from the Russians to develop their strategic arsenals. The North Korean No-Dong and Iranian Shahab class missiles are modified Russian SCUDs. The Iranian Bushehr reactor was built by the Russians and is guarded by advanced Russian surface to air missiles. The North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, which provided the fissible material for the regime’s nuclear weapons test, was initially built with assistance from the USSR. The same reactor design was identified last year in Syria, just before the Israelis bombed the facility. So why are we still locked into the vertical non-proliferation model with the Russians? All proliferation roads appear to lead to Moscow, as they’ve successfully bent the language of both START and the NPT for decades. Simply offering up European missile defense, prompt global strike, and a sizable percentage of our already aging nuclear inventory without aggressively hardening the horizontal proliferation language in the new treaty would be dangerously naive — and serves only to degrade our strategic strength and embolden our enemies.
