Obama’s New START: Incompetent or Intentional?

The New START video is the first of a series of spots asking whether the Obama Administration’s handling of various vital public policy issues is "Incompetent or Intentional."

President Obama’s fixation with "devaluing nuclear weapons" has prompted him to adopt policies, to take programmatic actions and to sign a flawed new arms control treaty that will leave the United States and its allies significantly less secure. The Center for Security Policy looks forward to providing some badly needed perspective on the true nature and grave risks associated with the President’s denuclearization agenda – with a view to laying the groundwork for a much-needed course correction during Senate consideration of what would better be described as the ‘False START’ treaty.

To learn more about the dangerous Obama de-nuclarization agenda, see Frank Gaffney’s  several pieces for background information:

The President’s new clothes

"The trouble is that President Obama says that [his $80 billion, ten-year "modernization"] expenditure will not buy a single new weapon.  Nor will any of it go towards testing the ones we have by exploding any of them underground – the only way to be absolutely certain they work.  Neither will we  reestablish the industrial base to build more than a handful of weapons.  Similarly, we will not actually manufacture any new bombers or missile launchers on land or at sea to replace the aging ones now in the force."

Are we serious about deterrence?

"There is an urgent need for an informed national debate about the future of the U.S. nuclear deterrent – which even President Obama claims we will need for the rest of his lifetime – and the prudence of allowing the continued atrophying of the weapons, delivery systems and industrial base that comprise it. Specifically, it is time to revisit whether the viability of the deterrent can be assured over the long-term without periodic safe, underground nuclear testing." 

 

Disarmer-in-Chief

"… The most alarming aspect of the Obama denuclearization program, however, is its explicit renunciation of new U.S. nuclear weapons – an outcome that required the president to overrule his own defense secretary. Even if there were no new START treaty, no further movement on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and no new wooly-headed declaratory policies, the mere fact that the United States will fail to reverse the steady obsolescence of its deterrent – and the atrophying of the skilled workforce needed to sustain it – will ineluctably achieve what is transparently President Obama’s ultimate goal: a world without American nuclear weapons."

 

Obama, unilateral Denuclearizer-in-Chief

"… The new Obama nuclear "strategy" leaves it up to lawyers – including apparently those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (whose members include China, Russia and Iran) – whether the United States will be allowed to use nuclear retaliation if we are attacked with chemical weapons, deadly biological viruses or electric grid-cratering cyberwarfare.  Like the rest of the President’s denuclearization agenda, this exemplary act of restraint is supposed to dissuade the Iranian and North Korean regimes and other nuclear wannabes from thinking it important to have and wield "the Bomb." 

 

And Amb. John Bolton’s critique of the New START treaty in National Review, A Treaty for Utopia:

"… The most appalling aspect of the Obama-Medvedev treaty is not its specific provisions, but what it reveals about President Obama’s national-security psychology. He has repeatedly said he believes lowering U.S. nuclear-warhead levels will encourage support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s weapons prohibitions on non-nuclear-weapons states. This is the purest form of theology, since the empirical evidence is entirely to the contrary. As the Cold War ended, Moscow and Washington made dramatic reductions in warhead levels, huge in percentage and absolute terms. Nonetheless, nuclear proliferation continued, and the pace is quickening. After START I and II, India, Pakistan, and North Korea tested nuclear weapons, and Iran rapidly approaches that point. Syria had a clandestine nuclear reactor until Israel destroyed it in September 2007. And if current and aspiring nuclear proliferators keep or develop weapons, this will encourage still more proliferation activity."

 

See also the Center’s new book, Dangerous Road: The Nuclear Policies of the Obama Administration, a collection of expert testimony from the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy and its New Deterrent Working Group.

Click the cover for a PDF preview of

DANGEROUS ROAD:
The Nuclear Policies of the
Obama Administration