March 17, 2014

NUCLEAR EXPERTS DETAIL DANGERS OF OBAMA’S SUPPORT OF ‘NUCLEAR ZERO’

By ExchangeMonitor

President Obama’s push for a world free of nuclear weapons is harming the confidence that its allies have in the United States’ extended nuclear deterrent, four conservative nuclear weapons experts said in a March 29 Washington Post op-ed. Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Bush Administration, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney, former Pacific Command chief Adm. James Lyons, and former CIA Director James Woolsey also suggested that Obama should put a hold on plans to further reduce the nation’s nuclear stockpile and focus on modernization promises made during debate on the New START Treaty in 2010. “Whatever good and idealistic intentions may have motivated the initial rhetoric about ‘nuclear zero,’ the practical effects of embracing this slogan are harmful,” Feith, Gaffney, Lyons, and Woolsey wrote. “The goal of minimizing the possibility of nuclear war is not served when the U.S. president, in speaking of the subject, appears disconnected from reality.”

The nuclear weapons experts suggested that the Obama Administration’s policy had done little to contain North Korea and Iran and had done significant damage to the U.S. extended deterrent. “Playing to certain audiences that crave disarmament talk is not a cost-free exercise,” they wrote. “The price is discomfiting serious, responsible officials in nations long content to forswear nuclear weapons largely because they could rely on the United States to provide the necessary security. Such reliance has served their interests and ours. It has contained the danger of nuclear war and preserved the world’s nonproliferation regime from collapse.”

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