Obama's Unilateral Nuke Retreat

President Obama’s plan to dramatically and unilaterally dismantle our nuclear stockpile will only invite America’s enemies to test and provoke us.

Today’s Washington Post has a lengthy front-page feature entitled, “Obama must decide degree to which U.S. swears off nuclear weapons.”

Of course, as I argued here at FrumForum two days ago, that’s exactly the wrong question to ask: because nuclear weapons aren’t the problem; bad governments and bad political actors are. And the United States requires a robust and modernized nuclear arsenal to deter both conventional and nuclear war.

So rather than seek to “swear off” nuclear weapons, the United States should seek to strengthen and upgrade its nuclear arsenal.

But we're not doing that.  Instead, we’re pledging to dramatically and unilaterally reduce our nuclear stockpile; ban low-yield, deeply-burrowing warheads, which might be used to destroy hidden nuclear facilities in Iran or North Korea; and explicitly foreswearing the use of nuclear weapons except in the most unlikely and farfetched of circumstances.

Needless to say, all of these Obama administration initiatives are seriously undermining the deterrent value of our nuclear arsenal. And this is something that America’s more vulnerable allies -- especially our East European friends, who have a long and recent memory of externally-imposed tyranny -- find troubling and disconcerting.

Indeed, the Post reports that Petr Kolar, the Czech ambassador to the United States is “skeptical” of Obama’s anti-nuke stance.

A country like ours, with a very special experience, with its own history [of outside domination, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets] -- we are maybe more cautious than some other countries…

My personal perspective is… we shouldn’t actually lose the instruments [-- i.e., nuclear warheads --] we so far have. What’s the change that would be gained by that?

In fact, there is nothing to be gained and everything to lose. Yet, the Post quotes Jan Lodal, a “senior Defense Department official in the Clinton administration”:

The United States can’t go around and ask others to give up their nuclear warheads while we maintain a list of official purposes for our nuclear weapons’ that necessitate a large arsenal.

Nonsense. Of course we can -- and we should.

Lodal and the Left argue that other countries won’t give up their nuclear weapons unless the United States does the same and begins to foreswear the use of such weapons. This new form of appeasement has obvious political appeal, but it is as false and as dangerous as earlier forms of appeasement -- and it posits an ahistorical argument.

In the 1990s, for instance, the United States deeply cut its nuclear arsenal by some 70-80 percent, says the Lexington Institute’s Dan Goure. However, he notes, that didn’t stop Iran or North Korea from continuing to seek and to build nuclear weapons.

In truth, most other countries recognize that the United States has no imperial designs or plans of plunder and conquest. Thus they really don’t fear our possession of nuclear weapons.

In fact, many countries -- in Eastern Europe, for instance -- want and welcome the American nuclear umbrella. Consequently, they fear the Obama administration’s attempt to deprecate the role and importance of nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, the hard Left is pressuring the president to move full speed ahead with his campaign pledge to disarm America. Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, for instance, insists that what is urgently needed is “a significant pulling back of the reach of the nuclear sword.”

Moreover, according to the Post:

More than two dozen Democrats, led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), chairman of the intelligence committee, have pressed Obama to adopt language saying the ‘sole’ or ‘only’ purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is deterrence. It would not prevent the U.S. government from using a weapon first, but would deemphasize that option in planning.

But planning is the mother’s milk of U.S. military operations -- the sine qua non of everything the U.S. military does and does not do. Indeed, if it’s not being planned for, then for all practical intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist; it likely cannot happen; and, therefore, it won’t have any deterrent value.

'We’re better off when we communicate that all options are on the table,’ said Thomas Mahnken, a senior Defense Department official in the Bush administration.

That’s exactly right. Communicating anything different is inherently risky. It’s inherently risky because it invites America’s enemies to test and to provoke us out of the mistaken belief that we might not do everything possible to defend ourselves and our interests.

The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review is one month late, allegedly because of fierce internal debates over what the right policy is and ought to be. But really, what seems to be at issue is not the direction in which the administration will move -- it will move left, and it will move to disarm America.

Instead, what seems to be at issue is just how far left the administration will move, and just how much disarmament Obama intends to achieve.