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Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Obama's Disastrous Nuclear Policy- Or, how we'll be up a creek without a paddle

Let's face it, it's not that Barack Obama didn't promise during his campaign speeches to "slow the development of future combat systems" or set his "goal of a world without nuclear weapons." He said it many times, including in the video below, so we shouldn't be surprised he's trying to cap his Obamacare triumph with the disarmament of the U.S.



But even though he made those promises back then, I hoped he would have some semblance of intelligence, at least enough to know that a world without nuclear weapons is well-nigh an impossibility, especially with madmen like Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il floating around the planet. Frankly, I don't believe that we can even trust China or Russia, for that matter, and the rate things are going in Pakistan and Afghanistan with Karzai threatening to join the Taliban, Pakistan's nuclear weapons are a disaster waiting to happen. Sure, we could stupidly rid ourselves of our arsenal, as Obama seems to want to do so willingly, but that doesn't mean that others will do the same. Other than outright blasting Iran to smithereens, the Iranian government is not going to comply. They want their nukes and no-one is going to stop them, not UN sanctions (even if they got every one on board including Russia and China) or Obama's begging, or the threat of Israel attacking. In fact, it's more than obvious they are bucking for some kind of action so that they feel justified in retaliating. Ahmadinejad, after all, believes that the return of the 12th Imam is predicated on an Armageddon, and that's more than likely the reason they are so hell-bent on nuclear capabilities.

So, as the rest of the world increases their nuclear arsenal, we have our kumbaya President enacting a nuclear policy that decreases our potential for use.

The Obama administration is unveiling a new nuclear weapons policy that seeks to narrow the circumstances under which the United States would use such weapons while preserving long-standing assurances of nuclear protection for allies, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. officials said the administration's new policy would stop short of declaring that the United States would never be the first to launch a nuclear attack, as many arms control advocates had recommended. But it would describe the weapons' purpose as "primarily" or "fundamentally" to deter or respond to a nuclear attack.

The officials said the document would say it is a U.S. goal to move toward a policy in which the "sole purpose" of nuclear weapons is to deter or respond to nuclear attack. That wording would all but rule out the use of such weapons to respond to an attack by conventional, biological or chemical weapons. Previous U.S. policy was more ambiguous.

In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, Obama said his administration was explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons. Those threats, he told the newspaper, could be deterred with "a series of graded options" — a combination of old and newly designed conventional weapons.


It's all well and good that Obama wants to sit down with Russia to discuss nuclear disarmament, but he has no assurances Russia will ever comply. We're going to be sitting ducks with no means of reprisal. God knows what else Obama is going to drag us into in the next few years, but we have all those who voted for him, who didn't vote at all, or who voted 3rd Party to thank for the mess we are headed for.

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