Titan II Missiles, formerly used as nuclear launch platforms, lie covered in clear plastic in an Air Force hangar. Image by © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS
NOAH ROTHMAN
Irving
Kristol famously wrote that neo-conservatism was an ideology for those who once
considered themselves members of the idealistic left, but who have been “mugged
by reality.” Barack Obama entered the Oval Office as one of Kristol’s wide-eyed
idealists. He, too, has been assaulted by learned experience. Apparently,
however, Obama is declining to press charges.
Ahead of his
final summit on nuclear security and nonproliferation as president, Barack
Obama penned a lengthy defense of his administration’s approach to the issue
for the Washington Post. In that effort, Obama chose to declare his continued
fealty to the naïve ideal of “a world without nuclear weapons.”
Of course,
the objective of putting the atomic genie back in its bottle is no more
attainable than is the idea the world could uninvent penicillin. As well as
being sheer fancy, both outcomes would be undesirable.
Obama
entered office a firm believer in the “nuclear zero” movement. “If we believe
that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are
admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable,” Obama
professed in April of 2009. That is a bizarre way to characterize a
half-century of effective deterrence, but such are the tenets of the faith. To
strengthen a binding non-proliferation regime, the president insisted that the
nation’s responsible nuclear powers must be uncompromising. “Rules must be
binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something,” he asserted.
If only Obama circa 2009 could see what he has become in 2016.
“[W]e’re
taking concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama wrote for
the Post, citing a reduction in the nuclear arsenals of both Russia and the
United States. That progress has not been consistent. In fact, the trend toward
disarmament in Europe may be set to reverse. In 2015, Director of the
Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control at the Russian Foreign
Ministry, Mikhail Ulyanov, warned that America’s supposedly provocative actions
have led the Kremlin to contemplate the development of new, more sophisticated
nuclear weapons to accompany its buildup of intercontinental ballistic missiles
and other modernized nuclear delivery vehicles. What’s more, Russia has flirted
with the forward deployment of nuclear weapons in places like Kaliningrad and
occupied Crimea.
In his
op-ed, Obama bragged about his administration’s efforts to limit the
development of new nuclear weapons in the U.S. and to narrow the contingencies
that would necessitate their use, but this is a misguided pursuit. Much of
America’s nuclear arsenal and its “triad,” – missile-capable submarines,
intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers – are literally
relics of the Cold War. The threat of deterrence breaks down when the deterred
party believes it can act with impunity; retaliation must be assured.
Worryingly, America’s nuclear arsenal is not necessarily reliable, as former
Defense Nuclear Agency Director and Navy Admiral Robert Monroe warned last
year.
“President
Obama’s policy doesn’t permit research, design, testing or production of new,
advanced nuclear weapons,” he lamented. “Our current nuclear weapons —
strategic and tactical — were designed and built decades ago to meet different
threats, and have gone untested for decades.” Equally disturbing, American
nuclear weapons research and development specialists have seen the handwriting
on the wall and have moved on to other more lucrative occupations. They are not
being replaced.
While the
United States is giving up on its nuclear weapons and Russia is leaning more
heavily on its arsenal, the nightmarish threat of nuclear terrorism looms ever
larger.
“Given the
continued threat posed by organizations such as the terrorist group we call
ISIL, or ISIS, we’ll also join allies and partners in reviewing our
counterterrorism efforts, to prevent the world’s most dangerous networks from
obtaining the world’s most dangerous weapons,” Obama wrote in the Post. On
this, the president has been consistent, reflective perhaps of the sobering
security briefings to which he is privy. “I continue to be much more concerned
when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off
in Manhattan,” the president said when dismissing the threat posed by Russia’s
invasion and annexation of sovereign territory in Europe, the first of its kind
since 1945. Obama is not wrong to fret about the prospect of fissile material
falling into the hands of ISIS or like-minded groups. Terrorist groups are
actively seeking the procurement of radioactive and fissionable substances.
An
Associated Press investigation in October of last year revealed that a nuclear
smuggling ring with ties to Russian governmental agencies was shopping
weapons-grade uranium to radical Islamic buyers through Moldovan proxies. The
smugglers’ aim, as one of the indicted smugglers told an informant, the hope
that their clients “will bomb the Americans.” Today, there is no more
Nunn-Lugar-style cooperative framework to prevent Russia from mishandling its
bomb-making materials. In January of 2015, the Russian government informed
Moscow that it would no longer permit U.S. personnel to protect its nuclear
facilities. “I think it greatly increases the risk of catastrophic terrorism,”
said one of the landmark post-Soviet cooperation law’s architects, former
Senator Sam Nunn. “The housekeeping by the Russians has not been
comprehensive,” his counterpart, former Senator Richard Lugar, agreed. “There
had been work done [with the United States] hunting down nuclear materials.
This is now terminated.”
Finally, and
most importantly from the perspective of the White House’s image-makers, Obama
made the effort in his op-ed to contend that his administration has been
particularly hard on rogue proliferators like North Korea and Iran.
“After
intense negotiations, Iran agreed to a nuclear deal that closes every single
one of its paths to a nuclear weapon, and Iran is now being subjected to the
most comprehensive inspection regimen ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear
program,” the president averred. “The additional sanctions recently imposed on
Pyongyang by the United Nations Security Council show that violations have
consequences.”
But those
consequences for North Korea have not prevented it from conducting nuclear
tests at will, launching a satellite into orbit (demonstrating that it can put
an atomic warhead on any major American city), and working on a second-strike
capability in the form of missile-ready submarines. Pyongyang’s experience
should prove a tempting model for Tehran to follow once it determines that the
benefits of the vaunted Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka, the Iran
nuclear deal) are yielding diminishing returns. The inspections regime the
president touts is a joke. The Islamic Republic has continued to develop and
test nuclear-capable delivery vehicles, and the punishments they have faced for
their violations amount to a slap on the wrist. Obama himself has admitted that
the deal’s restrictions merely lengthen the time it will take for Iran to
complete a nuclear “breakout.” When that day comes, the United States will have
to determine whether to use force as it’s final failsafe – force its allies in
the West, who are now racing to get a piece of the action in Iran, will oppose.
“We’re
clear-eyed about the high hurdles ahead,” President Obama concludes, “but I
believe that we must never resign ourselves to the fatalism that the spread of
nuclear weapons is inevitable.” If this is clear-eyed, we should pray for a
return to the hard-nosed sobriety displayed by an earlier generation of Cold
Warriors. The only effective way to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons
is by eliminating the need for deterrence. South Africa, Belarus, and Ukraine
surrendered their nuclear stockpiles only when the threats in their neighborhoods
were neutralized. Today, a wave of democratization that crested in the 1990s is
receding, and interstate conflict is no longer the stuff that fills the pages
of history books. Obama can recite deluded liberal nostrums about the
uselessness of nuclear weapons all he wants, but everyone else seems to see
their utility perfectly fine.
Source>https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/military/obamas-nuclear-delusions/
