Obama and Nuclear Arms Control

The focus of this website is gun and other closely related matters.  I intentionally try to keep other issues away from this website, since I don’t want to detract from the gun-related message.  However a recent article in Newsweek, which relates to nuclear arms control and President Obama, seemed both interesting and somewhat related to the gun rights issue:

As I’ve previously mentioned, President Obama is an ardent opponent of gun rights.  He was endorsed by the Brady Campaign, and chose gun rights opponent Joe Biden to be his vice president.  He then nominated anti gun individuals such as Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and Harold Hongju Koh to key positions within his administration.

However it is not just small arms that Obama dislikes – he also seems to be opposed to a variety of other weapons, including nuclear bombs.  So far, Obama’s anti gun efforts within the US have primarily been just talk – however when it comes to international arms control efforts, Obama has been more active.  In a couple weeks, Obama and 14 other world leaders will come together in New York for a special UN Security Council meeting.  On the agenda is how they can rid the world of nuclear weapons.  To be sure, total nuclear disarmament anytime soon is just not going to happen, and I am not really worried that Obama could bring it about.  However, as the Newsweek article discusses in detail, a nuclear free world likely be undesirable:

A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer.

The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Second, there’s never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it’s hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading “nuclear optimist” and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, “We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It’s striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states.”

The full article, entitled Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb, can be seen here.