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October 17, 2014      4:01 PM

Stanford: Obama’s $1 Trillion Broken Promise

From the Left: Our liberal columnist Jason Stanford argues that President Obama must be held accountable for his vows of nuclear disarmament

How much would you borrow to buy something that you would never use and might kill you and everyone around you? If we’re talking about Uncle Sam’s outdated and useless nuclear arsenal, the price tag is $1.1 trillion. A better—and cheaper—idea might be doing what Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and a host of others wanted to do in the first place: Get rid of nuclear weapons.

Here’s the basic problem: We’ve got about 4,800 nuclear weapons in silos, on submarines, and in airplane hangars that need to be fixed like old root canals. They’re way past their sell-by date and more dangerous to us than to an enemy that no longer exists, writes Eric Schlosser in “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.” By the way, that is now the scariest book I’ve ever read. It makes Revelations look like a Lifetime Movie.)  

In a 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” noted hippies and peaceniks George Schultz and Henry Kissinger (both former Republican Secretaries of State) and William J. Perry and Sam Nunn (each a Democratic hawk), argued that deterrence was dead as a military strategy because of the threat of nuclear terrorism. Intelligence, not realpolitik, is what stops terrorists from getting the bomb. And what’s stopping Iran’s nuclear program isn’t our ICBMs but economic sanctions and diplomacy.

Getting nuclear weapons off this planet before we’re all killed is a bipartisan idea. At the Reykjavik summit, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev briefly agreed to “eliminate… all nuclear weapons” before hotter heads prevailed. Reagan wouldn’t give up our missile defense program, not understanding that the Soviet Union saw that as a threat.  

Inspired by Nunn, then-Sen. Obama worked diligently on nuclear non-proliferation in the Senate and made a nuclear-free world a goal of his foreign policy as president that he articulated best in 2009 speech in Prague.

Jason Stanford’s entire column can be found in our R&D Department.

By Jason Stanford