Realist ‘Four Horsemen’ Challenge Obama, Other ‘Global Zero’ Advocates to Abandon US Denuclearization

(Washington, D.C.): This week’s Sunday Washington Post featured an op.ed. by four members of a group of twenty former senior military and civilian national security professionals who recently called on President Barack Obama to abandon his reported intention to make further, deep and apparently unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The article, entitled “Obama’s Harmful Nuclear Illusions,” was authored by former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Assistant Secretary of Defense (acting) Frank Gaffney, former Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet Admiral James “Ace” Lyons and former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey.

This essay serves as a powerful rebuttal to a series of op.ed. articles promoting “global zero,” an initiative that seeks – in President Obama words – “a world without nuclear weapons,” that have been published since 2007 in the Wall Street Journal by a like-number of other past, senior officials, informally dubbed “the Four Horsemen”: former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn. The most recent of these appeared on March 5, 2013.

In contrast to the wishful thinking exhibited by these individuals and the Obama administration, the four realists observed: “Playing to certain audiences that crave disarmament talk is not a cost-free exercise. The price is discomfiting serious, responsible officials in nations long content to forswear nuclear weapons largely because they could rely on the United States to provide the necessary security. Such reliance has served their interests and ours. It has contained the danger of nuclear war and preserved the world’s nonproliferation regime from collapse.”

The new “Horsemen” conclude: “In the name of opposing nuclear proliferation, promoting international cooperation and championing peace, the Obama administration has embraced ‘nuclear zero’ and a set of nuclear policies that risk spurring proliferation, harming U.S. alliances and increasing the danger that nuclear war someday will occur. The worst error of governments is not failing to achieve their purposes; it is achieving the opposite of what they properly intend.”

The signatories of the open letter to President Obama, who include two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and eighteen others with “decades of experience with national security policy and practice,” declared: “It is now clear that, as a practical matter under present and foreseeable circumstances, this agenda will only result in the unilateral disarmament of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. That will make the world more dangerous, not less.”

A national debate on the wisdom of “global zero” and further dismantling of the U.S. deterrent – via negotiations or unilaterally – is long overdue. Let it begin now.

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Press accounts indicate that the President was planning on announcing a cut of as much as one-third of the American deterrent during his State of the Union address on February 12th. He evidently decided to postpone the unveiling of this initiative, however, when North Korea conducted on that same day it latest nuclear test – an event that underscored the fact that only the United States is, under his administration, engaging in denuclearization. In our professional judgment…America’s “Triad” of nuclear-armed land-based and submarine-launched missiles and bomber-delivered nuclear weapons have promoted strategic stability and discouraged proliferation. Steps that raise uncertainty about the viability, reliability and effectiveness of our deterrent will have the opposite effect.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy which facilitated this letter, observed:

As President Obama meets today with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is expected to emphasize the United States’ commitment to its most important Asian ally at a time when the threat to Japan from China and North Korea is growing by the day. The single most tangible thing Mr. Obama could do to give substance to such rhetoric would be to eschew further weakening of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – and the extended deterrent or “nuclear umbrella” it has constituted for nearly seventy years. The signers of this letter have rendered an incalculably important service by challenging the myth that doing otherwise in pursuit of a “world without nuclear weapons” is either achievable or desirable under present and foreseeable circumstances.

The full text of the letter is attached.

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