Nuclear arms treaty with Russia is no priority

I’ve long maintained that the Democratic Party’s platform is mired in 1980, when the right to abortion still wasn’t assured and the Vietnam War seemed proof America was wrong about everything.

Now President Obama’s odd quest for a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia makes me wonder if the Democrats also believe the Soviet Union still exists, as it did in 1980.

What is the point of the U.S. and Russia reducing nuclear weapons today? The matter was urgent in the 1980s, when President Reagan negotiated the first nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet evil empire.

No big worry. But today Russia is at least a shell of a democracy, and it no longer has the ideology of world conquest. No one on Earth has been fretting lately about the Russian nuclear threat. So why work so hard on a treaty that doesn’t matter?

The only upside to reducing U.S. and Russian nukes would be the ability to tell other nations, look, we’ve reduced our arsenals, why not get rid of yours?

Weighing against that point is the likelihood that, if we cut back on our atom bombs, smaller powers seeking respect will calculate that it’s cheaper than ever to match the U.S. and Russia, so why not go nuke, too?

Putin promises? So why is this a priority? And does anyone believe that, if Vladimir Putin promises to shrink his arsenal by a third, he won’t cheat?

Frank Warner

Comments

[Neo]

Obama is trying to fulfill his dreams from his time at Columbia, when he wrote about nuclear disarmament and how to deal with the Soviets.