The new nuclear disarmament treaty announced today, to be signed May 24th, is about 3 pages long by all accounts. Why, you ask? Because, unlike those of the past, this one works on the honor system and doesn’t include provisions to check that both nations are honestly complying with its terms.
Even with safeguards in place, it would be impossible to make sure that the Russians are destroying their nuclear arsenal. Under this new treaty, both nations are to reduce their nuclear force by 2/3. If we comply and they don’t, we could emerge in the target year with a severely reduced force, staring down a Russian force with 2 to 1 missile superiority.
Of course, now that we’ve dropped out of the ABM treaty, we could build the missile defence system and make the whole thing irrelevant…but it that solution even practical anymore? The only sure solution is to keep our nuclear missile force strong, that’s the only deterrent that works.
Bush had announced that he would reduce the US nuclear arsenal, even if the Russians didn’t reciprocate. I agree with him. Apparently we have far more nuclear weapons than we could conceivably need.
If Russia makes a reduction too, so much the better. If they cheat, and keep their nukes, then we’ll be no worse off than if we had made the unilateral reduction that Bush was prepared to do. Of course, I hope they don’t cheat…
Yeah, it doesn’t really matter if they don’t cut their weapons. I mean, if they have a 2-1 advantage, so what? So they can blow up the world 10 times instead of 5 times like us?
Actually, they can’t blow up the world any more than we could. All the “turn the world to ashes” talk is fairly far-fetched hyperbole. OTOH, they do have enough meagatonage to knnock America back 150-200 years in population and infrastructure, at least twice over. We could do the same to them at least twice over. Once you’ve done it once, you run out of targets worth nuking.
I love the idea that Bush has the huevos to run a potlatch… If the Russians don’t down-size, we win (while still retaining our newest and most efficient nukes). If the Russians do downsize, everyone wins. If the Russians downsize more than we do, they win, but we still win (fewer nukes aimed at anyone, including us). The English are with us on this, so they win, too. Hell, the whole freekin’ globe wins!
Face it folks, Bush has pulled a rabbit out of his hat: the only way he can possibly lose from this is to reneg. For all the talk and bluster of previous administrations, only GW has had the balls to unilaterally slice deeply into the stockpile.
He won’t renege on this one. Not because of principle (I’ve lost complete faith in Bush’s ‘principles’), but because there is no vested interest that wants to keep them. As December said, it’s win/win for everyone. Smart move.
It also falls under the ‘only Nixon can go to China’ category - if Clinton had tried it, he probably would have been attacked from the right for it. Bush has the political capital that Clinton lacked - but it still took smarts and chutzpah to do it.
First of all, Russia has no conceivable reason to use their nuclear weapons against the United States. If we assume they pulled off some amazing first strike that wiped the US out before they could respond, Russia would still lose when the global economic downturn turned their poor economic state into a complete disaster.
And speaking of poor economic states, Russia needs to cut their arsenal. They can’t afford to maintain it all, and they can’t keep it secure. This helps the US military save some money and manpower, but it helps the Russian military a whole lot more.
IMO, this is the best single policy move Bush has made.
Well, I think it is a good thing overall. I’ll ask my Dad for his opnion on this next time I talk to him. (He was an expert on nuclear war stuff for a while so he understands the issue real well) At the same time I doubt the reduction in nuclear arm levels is going to be big enough to make a war ‘winable’.
Also, Russia, while not exactly an ally these day, is not our great enemy anymore.
We can also use the money saved to work on other military areas more applicable to the war on terror and other issues in the world today.
Only if the senate ratifies. The administration’s attempt to move towards informal agreements with other nations clearly failed here. Since both sides came to the talks wanting to reduce their nuclear stockpiles, it might even be fair to say that the Bush team ‘blinked’ in caving in to Russian demands for a formal arms treaty. The sounds from congress have so far been encouraging, but now it’s certain that whatever Bush and company agreed to will be closely scrutinized before the senate actually commits us to it.
