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.
Obama is reportedly considering reductions of our nuclear arsenal — already cut from approximately 1,800 weapons to 1,550 by the new START treaty — to as few as 300. These options are being studied even as Iran brags about its enhanced and accelerated uranium enrichment facilities, when Russia, China and North Korea are strengthening their nuclear arsenals, and Pakistan’s role as a nuclear wild card seems to grow riskier by the day. Beyond deterrence — nuclear weapons’ principal function — America’s national security strategy has long provided only a very few “last resort” uses of those weapons. Razing them to the levels Obama is considering will seriously reduce their deterrent value and further narrow those endgame options. This is dangerous folly.
Obama’s “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership” military strategy document, released last month, follows hard on the plan he described in his Prague speech, saying that we may be able to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal, as well as their role in national security strategy. But sentiment and fact-based strategy are two very different things. The president’s approach to defense spending cuts has been to set a budget target and then make whatever cuts are necessary to achieve it. There has been no assessment of current and potential threats and what it will take to deter or defeat them. The same is quite evident in his approach to reducing the size of our nuclear arsenal.
Before Congress authorizes any reduction in the nuclear arsenal, it must demand a threat-based analysis of what’s needed to deter nuclear aggression or defeat it, regardless of its origin. It may be that the United States can safely reduce its nuclear arsenal, but first Congress needs an authoritative assessment of how large it needs to be to assure the nation’s security. Congress ought also demand that Obama respond to a key related question raised by the new START treaty but never answered: How many missiles, aircraft and submarines are needed to assure national security. Answer these two questions, then talk about having fewer nukes.
