US and Russia Agree to Nuke Cuts

Barack Obama is on a two-day trip to Moscow to "reset" US-Russian Relations. Speaking to a roomful of business students, he said, "Let me be clear: America wants a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia." As part of that, he and President Medvedev signed an agreement to cut both nations' nuclear arsenals. This will enhance the security of both countries and increase their ability to address proliferation issues with other nations.

Presently, the US and Russia possess something like 95% of all the nuclear weapons in the world. Under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they committed themselves to reducing their arsenals, but this reduction has stalled in recent years. As a result, they lack the moral authority to tell other signatories not to develop nukes of their own. The deal the two presidents signed yesterday is a start in regaining that authority.

The agreement that Messrs. Obama and Medvedev signed reads in part, "Within seven years after this treaty [yet to be negotiated] comes into force, and in future, the limits for strategic delivery systems should be within the range of 500-1,100 units and for warheads linked to them within the range of 1,500-1,675 units." This would, of course, still be sufficient to incinerate the planet, but the movement towards smaller arsenals is a positive good.

The argument during the Cold War was that both sides had to have a huge number of warheads to be secure. Neither could destroy every nuke the other had, and therefore, both were vulnerable to a counter-strike. As a result, neither had an interest in launching a first strike. It was the appropriately named concept Mutually Assured Destruction [MAD].

Since the Cold War, a new dimension entered the equation, non-state actors such as Al Qaeda. When a terrorist organization gets a nuke, it will use it and damned be the consequences. As a result, the security of the world increases as the number of nuclear warheads declines. It's simply easier to keep track of 1,500 than it is 15,000. These weapons will never be completely gone; the genie is out of the bottle. Yet the fewer the better.

There remains the problem of America's proposed missile defense system. This dispute between the two got sidestepped at the summit, "kicked into the long grass" as one person put it. The fact that the thing doesn't really work, and probably can't be made to work, should make a compromise easy in the coming years. America can abandon an ineffective military project, thus saving money and face.

Mr. Obama told the Associated Press, "The old Cold War approaches to US-Russian relations is outdated, that it's time to move forward in a different direction." A few accidents of history made the US and Russia rivals, but in truth, they have far too many common interests to stay that way. The current Russian government is a rather unpalatable bunch of secret policemen and their hangers-on, but they cannot last forever, and it would be foolhardy of Washington to ignore America's interests simply because of that. The George W. Bush administration proved that America cannot remake the world in its own image but that America must deal with the world as it is.

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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