Sen. Kyl: Obama is Destroying US Nuclear Defense, Slowly but Surely

President Obama’s speech to a German audience last week in which he announced his intentions to continue pursuing a dramatically lessened US nuclear arsenal is a terrible precursor of things to come, according to former US Senator from Arizona Jon Kyl.

Kyl, who left office at the beginning of this year, told Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio that he believes that despite Obama’s wish for Global Zero, he is “practical enough to know that can’t be achieved in his term in office.  Therefore he is simply taking steps during his term in office to try to deemphasize the importance of our strategic nuclear deterrent, to reduce the amount of nuclear weaponry that we have, and recently to undercut the future of our nuclear program and its sustainability by supporting reductions in funding that will make it very, very difficult for us to maintain the nuclear stockpile that we have.”

To suit his needs, Kyl argues, Obama has chosen to “redefine the threat, and therefore the type of action that the government would have to take in time of an emergency and a potential nuclear situation. And of course by redefining, dumbing down as it were, the threat, he can conclude that we don’t need as many nuclear weapons.”

The fact is, according to Kyl, that threats remain, and Obama’s belief that the US can remain safe with a weaker nuclear defense is based on extremely faulty logic that flies in the face of recent history.

“This is the great canard of the nuclear zero people: if we would only lead by example the rest of the world will follow. Well, we haven’t tested nuclear weapons since 1992. And yet all of the countries that you mention have increased their nuclear capability,” says Kyl. “So, this argument if we just eliminate ours everybody else will too is not only false, it’s very dangerous because the reality is the lower we go, the easier it is for other countries—say China—to achieve parity with the United States.”

This naiveté means that Obama is attempting to broker deals that are of no benefit to the United States, but greatly help its rivals. In the case of Russia, for instance, Obama wants to “talk to the Russians to see if he can also get them to reduce their nuclear weapons even further below the level just accomplished by the New START treaty a couple years ago.”

“The Russians aren’t going to go along with this, unless he’s willing to restrict significantly our missile defenses. And I think it would be a great irony if in effect he says, ‘Alright Russia, if you will allow us to reduce our nuclear weapons by a third, we will in return promise to you that our missile defenses will not be effective against Russian nuclear weapons.’ That’s a heck of a deal.”