You know, just some warheads. Courtesy of Wikicommons.
Have you had a drill in school where you curl up under your desk and hope that the Soviets don’t drop a nuke on you?
Believe it or not this was a standard practice in US schools not long ago. Clearly American school desks were once quite robust if they could protect children from nuclear annihilation.
With poorer school desks available today, we were relieved to learn that the Russians and the Americans have agreed to reduce their arsenals of nuclear weapons. (Check the link for our explanation.)
Today, President Obama and Russian President Medvedev are set to sign the “new START” (START = Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) in Prague, signaling a new wave for American nuclear policy. To go along with this big meeting, the Obama administration just released the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).
Essentially, one key factor in the nuclear weapons game is the idea of deterrence. You know, if Country A has the power to destroy Country B and vice versa, then they both might be deterred from using them against each other. Right?
What the NPR says is that the U.S. will respect the idea of deterrence while promising not to use nuclear weapons against countries that have promised not to use them either — in other words, countries that are down with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Sounds diplomatic enough, right? But there’s more…
Slate points out that the United States hasn’t given up its potential to use nuclear weapons first against certain nations, and there are a few other important messages within the NPR:
Second, it provides another incentive for countries — even unfriendly countries — not to develop nuclear weapons (if they believe the U.S. declaration, anyway).
Third, it further isolates those countries that are in violation of the NPT — which is to say, Iran and North Korea.
The report additionally indicates that the United States will no longer be producing new nuclear weapons, just rehabilitating the old ones when needed.
The NPR was sure to not please everyone, given the sensitive nature of the subject, and one of the displeased was Walter Shapiro, writing for Politics Daily. Speaking of the document:
This is an inspiring piece of writing filled with bold pronouncements that are immediately contradicted by fine-print caveats. The document unequivocally pledges that America will not initiate a nuclear exchange (except in those cases where we might) and earnestly promises to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the overall national security strategy (while maintaining most of the current nuclear arsenal as a devastating deterrent).
Additionally, Michael Levi for The Daily Beast sees the policy shift happening in the NPR, but notices a loophole:
The United States now appears to be keeping open the option of using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear Iran, but not against other states that might pose identical military threats.
Levi also points out in his piece that essentially, the real ways to deal with current nuclear threats, like nuclear terrorism, aren’t quite explicit in the Review at all… (This could be a problem.) He concludes,
Those efforts, though, receive only passing attention. That’s fine: This strategy is supposed to be focused on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But it means that the administration still has much work to do.
What these two writers have in common is the complaint that the report doesn’t really do all that much in terms of creating peace. (But the trust-building potential is there.) Though not discounting that there actually is a shift happening, they note that the dramatic shift some might have been hoping for just wasn’t there.
One thing is clear from what we’ve sampled here: there’s no clear-cut path to a nuclear-weapons free world, and that’s why this Review isn’t clear-cut in its ways to get there.
All we can hope for is that the U.S.’s nuclear defense strategists won’t find themselves in a “Dr. Strangelove” kind of setting…
Let us know what you’re thinking! Can we have a world without nuclear weapons, or are we just going to keep living on the edge of our seats (or under our desks)?
