Further Dismantling Deterrence

Further Dismantling Deterrence

The Remaining Months of the Obama Nuclear Agenda

An Occasional Paper of the Center for Security Policy

By Ben Lerner

“In 2009, shortly after being sworn into office, President Obama delivered a speech in Prague in which he declared his intent to seek a “world without nuclear weapons,” misguidedly assuming that adversarial nuclear nations, and those aspiring to have such a capability, would share that goal. In the years that followed, Obama took several steps to weaken our own nuclear deterrent, including signing the deeply flawed New START treaty with Russia – which significantly cut our own number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, while having the opposite effect on Russia’s arsenal – steadily defunding and otherwise undermining missile defense , declining to undertake the design or production of new nuclear weapons during the past eight years while foot-dragging on modernizing what remains of our deterrent , and letting our existing weapons atrophy by continuing a 1992 self-imposed freeze on nuclear testing.”

further_dismantling_deterrence