Barack Obama: Reduce World Nuclear Weapons to Zero
By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It has been two years since those four wrinkled handmaidens of the Military Industrial Complex—George Shultz, Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger and William Perry—chose the unlikely venue of the Wall St. Journal op-ed page to suggest that humanity should embark on a quest to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world to none.
As in Zero.
Let's stipulate: these are not your typical love-beaded, peace-sign-flashing flower children, carrying "Ban the Bomb" signs through the Pentagon parking lot. Nor are they engaged in some late-life, symbolic, well-meaning-but-it-could-never-happen act of penance. They mean it.
In our age of suicide bombers, eager to cause mass civilian casualties, the old policies of deterrence, and mutually assured destruction, have been found lacking. Disarmament and strategic defense, the four suggest, may be a better way to go.
You can bet on it: with the U.S. and Russia scheduled to resume strategic arms limitation talks, with nuclear Pakistan looking a bit wobbly and Iran making progress on nuclear power, we'll be spending much of the next four years dusting off the old nuclear vernacular. And getting to Zero will be—stunningly—a part of the discussion.
Two of the four running dog peaceniks—Shultz and Nunn—showed up at the Center for Strategic & International Studies last night to report on their mission to a sell-out crowd of foreign policy mandarins. The Pentagon, the Hill and Embassy Row were well-represented.
Has the new Obama administration, swamped with immediate crises, given any hints about its own goals regarding nuclear arms?
Shultz, the spry, web-surfing Californian, had the answer. Check out the new White House web site, he told the crowd; where, in fact, Obama and Biden have embraced the goal of Zero.
"A world free of nuclear weapons. ... They are there ...that is the posture we are in," said Schulz. "A lot flows from that."
Would not that be an historic legacy for Audacious and his team?
Stay tuned.
- Read more by John Aloysius Farrell.
- Read more from the Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
- Read more about nuclear weapons.
Tags: nuclear weapons | Barack Obama | Obama administration
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Reader Comments
Great Thought
But nuclear weapons have kept the peace for the longest period in human history. It would be most unwise to follow a course of disarmament especially as not everyone can be trusted to do so.
This argument is similar to the one made after World War 1 concerning the limitation of warships. It failed.
Nuclear weapons won the peace, and have kept the peace.
The war-mongers and industrialists would like nothing better than a return to the global carnage and profits created by conventional weaponry.
Nuclear Weapons
With Muslim extremists (read Pakistan) in possession of nuclear weapons and trained Muslim suicidal maniacs on the loose, the world is not safe. So let us be fatalistic and hold on to some for MAD.
this is not the time for disarmaments
I Think that it is alittle too early to expect disarmaments from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, N. Korea etc etc and who knows when Dingbat Iran will get their bomb....our country needs to be stronger not weaker.....
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