I like that President Obama isn’t just paying lip service to nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, but is actually thinking through ways to change the paradigm so that other nations can think anew about the role of nuclear weapons in their own defense systems. My only concern is that he make sure to have the support of some Republicans for the controversial moves he wants to make. I am hoping that he has at least the consent of Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But he needs more than Lugar. A lot more. If he want to ratify the new agreement with Russia, he’s going to need 67 votes in the U.S. Senate. And the announcements he’s making today go beyond re-upping on Strategic Arms Limitations.
President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.
But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.
Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.
Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.
It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.
If this is part of an overall strategy to get the UN Security Council to impose meaningful sanctions on Iran and reinvigorate a truly international commitment to non-proliferation, then I can understand the timing. But it does seem to put the cart before the horse. While these announcements may make it easier to get sanctions that will cool the march to war with Iran, they also would appear to make passage of a new treaty with Russia infinitely more difficult. Maybe there is no way to achieve both goals at once. If that is the case, the more important thing is to reset the paradigm. But I hope Obama doesn’t think that the right-wing wurlitzer isn’t going to spin this as unilateral disarmament. Because that is exactly what they’re going to do.
