Phil Taubman writes in the Sunday New York Times what many people in Washington think about our outdated nuclear policy, but few say. He makes six key points.
Taubman knows what he is talking about, having spent years as the Times bureau chief in Moscow and Washington. He has spent the last three years writing a critically acclaimed book, The Partnership, that tracks the efforts of five former Cold Warriors to change the policies they once championed but they now see as outdated, dangerous, and counter to U.S. national security interests.
He is stunned by the grip that Cold War thinking still has in Washington. "Over the last three years, as I delved into the world of American nuclear weapons," he says, "I felt increasingly as though I had stepped into a time warp."
He is frustrated that President Obama's officials have not implemented the policies the president declared in Prague in April 2009.
Barack Obama took office determined to change that. He has made progress on many fronts. Last week, he outlined a new, no-frills defense strategy, downsizing conventional forces. He now needs to double down on his commitment to refashion nuclear forces. He should trim the American nuclear arsenal by two-thirds to bring it down to a sensible size, order the Pentagon to scale back nuclear war-fighting plans so they are relevant to contemporary threats, remove most American intercontinental, land-based missiles from high alert and drop the quaint notion that a fleet of aging B-52 bombers can effectively deliver nuclear weapons to distant targets.
Here are the six key take-aways from Taubman's analysis:
I agree with all these points. In fact, I have written a similar analysis that will be published later this week. But do yourself a favor and read Taubman's full article. And then go write your representatives to demand they do something about this.
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There are more or less about 10,000 nuclear warheads existed around the globe. The contaminations Just 200 of them will make this world difficult to breath, not mentioned to live. "Congratulation" human has the tools to kill themselves entirely for 50 times. It makes completely NO Sense to build stuffs to destroy where we live. There are somethings VERY WACKY. to see that to what extent Americans need 5000 war heads in stock for. Americans should be aware of that 5000 its safety, not a few from other countries. There are a lot of way getting burn by playing with FIRE.
As to whether it has much relevance in the 21st century is debatable, but there may be a time when the USA's and Russia's strategic arsenals again avert more serious conflicts.