A top national security advisor for Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said yesterday that the Obama Administration has focused too much on Russia when considering reductions to the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Dov Zakheim, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Reagan and Bush Administration Defense Department official, told NW&M Monitor after a debate on national security and foreign policy with Obama Administration advisor Richard Verma yesterday that a host of factors would impact Romney’s interest in reducing the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile, namely preserving U.S. missile defense plans and the actions of other countries. The Obama Administration is pursuing cuts beyond the 1,550-cap on strategic deployed warheads in the New START Treaty which Romney opposed. “I think his priority clearly is to protect our missile defense program,” Zakheim told NW&M Monitor on the sidelines of the event at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. “I don’t recall him saying that he wouldn’t cut but I think that is the number one priority. We need clarity on that. The other thing you’ve got to remember is it isn’t just Russia that has these weapons. The weapons and stockpile that is growing most quickly is Pakistan. If they keep that up they’re going to overtake a lot of countries so you’ve got to look at the entire situation when you look at what we need to do. I think this administration has focused far too much on Russia without looking anywhere else.” He said when taking into consideration factors beyond Russia, “you may come up with a somewhat different answer.”
Zakheim also reiterated Romney’s support for modernizing the nation’s nuclear weapons complex and arsenal, which was a key part of the 2012 GOP platform released this summer. “We’ve got to modernize,” he said. “If we’re not modernizing we have a whole bunch of obsolete weapons. That doesn’t help anybody, least of all us.”
