Perhaps you do not know that President Obama has asked the
Pentagon to develop plans to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal by up
to 80 percent. That would ultimately leave America with just about
300 nuclear weapons, down from a high of over 31,000 at the height
of the Cold War.
In 2010, President Obama completed negotiations with Russia for
a New Start Treaty, which reduces America’s nuclear warheads to
1,550. There were effectively no reductions in Russian weapons in
return, because the collapsed Soviet empire was functionally unable
to maintain the threatening nuclear arsenal it maintained during
the Cold War.
President Obama exhibits a very strange lack of recognition of
anything that happened during the Reagan years and the 1990s when
Republicans gained control of Congress. You can see that in his
failure to recognize any of the Reagan economic policies and their
astounding success. He acts and talks as if none of that ever
happened, perversely returning to the disastrously failed Keynesian
economic policies of the 1970s.
Similarly, in foreign policy, President Obama acts and talks as
if he doesn’t know that America under Reagan/Bush won the Cold War
without firing a shot, in Margaret Thatcher’s celebrated phrase,
and the old Soviet power is no more. When he entered office, there
were no arms control treaties in effect because the old Soviet
Union that was party to START I no longer existed.
In this context, reopening and completing New START Treaty
negotiations with the surviving Russian Federation raises troubling
concerns about President Obama’s seemingly eerie state of mind. It
is as if, so doggedly pursuing the opposite of everything that
Reagan did, he is trying to reopen the Cold War, but this time with
the opposite result: America loses.
The old Soviet Union cannot easily be put back together. But
more troubling for America is that this is no longer a bipolar
world. China is a rapidly emerging military power building new,
highly advanced nuclear and space weaponry, and a navy that is on
course to push American naval forces out of the Western Pacific in
a couple of decades, if not sooner. While Newt Gingrich’s political
opponents ridiculed his proposal for an American moon base by the
end of this decade, the Chinese will have one looking down on our
food stamp nation within a couple of decades.
As Frank Gaffney wrote
in the February 22 Washington Times:
The Obama Administration continues to assume that the People’s
Liberation Army has only a few hundred nuclear weapons —
approximately the number to which our commander in chief would like
to reduce the American arsenal. A radically different estimate was
recently provided, however, in a Georgetown University study led by
a former Pentagon strategic forces analyst, Professor Phillip
Karber….Mr. Karber’s team concluded that, based on the vast
infrastructure China has created to conceal its missiles [3,000
miles of hardened tunnels], it may have as many as 3,000 nuclear
weapons.
Nuclear weaponry is also proliferating to Iran and North Korea,
and soon to their rivals as America’s nuclear umbrella becomes less
and less reliable. That can mean Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and
Egypt, besides Pakistan, which already has nukes that can fall into
terrorist hands. And even shrunken Russia recently announced, under
its about to be reinstalled President Vladimir Putin, a new $770
billion defense modernization plan with 400 new long range nuclear
missiles, quite possibly each one with multiple, independently
targeted warheads. This includes modernized ICBMs and submarine
launched ballistic missiles. It is all in compliance with President
Obama’s New Start Treaty
In this real world of today, agreeing with Russia alone to
reduce American nuclear arsenals further makes no sense.
The Reagan Pretense
In his
trip to South Korea last week, President Obama once again extolled
his dream of a world without nuclear weapons, a vision he has
treasured since his days as a radical student leftist at Columbia
University. He announced that, even with the New Start nuclear
reductions, he “can say with confidence that we have more nuclear
weapons than we need.” That is why he asked the Pentagon to prepare
plans for him to reduce America’s nuclear deterrent by up to 80
percent. As Frank Gaffney
explained in the March 27 Washington Times, President
Obama declared in South Korea that “since he is convinced we have
more of those weapons than we need — he is going to reduce our
arsenal. According to some accounts, he has in mind cutting it to
roughly the size of Pakistan’s.”
President Obama pretends that he is just carrying out Reagan’s
professed dream of a world without nuclear weapons. But that was to
be for a day with highly advanced nuclear missile defenses, when
the world did not include such aggressive military rivals as still
threaten us.
President Obama secured enough Republican votes for passage of
the New Start Treaty by promising to expand and complete U.S.
missile defenses, and to modernize our own badly aging nuclear
deterrent. That involved completing all four phases of the planned
U.S. missile defenses in Europe and nearby seas, and modernizing
and completing the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) on the
American homeland. That also involved promises to fully fund
America’s depreciating nuclear weapons laboratories essential to
keeping up with the modernization of the Russian and Chinese
arsenals.
But President Obama is backing down from those promises. He
never proposed or supported that full modernization funding. As
Gaffney explained in the February 22 Washington Times,
“the administration also is walking away from its promises to
modernize what remains of our deterrent. Over time, the practical
effect of combining the draconian nuclear cuts Mr. Obama seeks and
his failure to arrest and reverse the atrophying of the obsolescing
arsenal will leave us functionally disarmed.”
While America never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
it voluntarily follows a policy of no testing. That means we cannot
be sure of the degree to which our nuclear arsenal is actually
functional. President Bush was pursuing the Reliable Replacement
Warhead program, which would have modernized America’s force with
much more reliable, new, modern weapons that would not need as much
service and maintenance over time. But vigorously opposed by the
Democrats, the program has been terminated by President Obama.
Then in South Korea, there was the open mic controversy, where
President Obama was heard telling his confidante, outgoing Russian
President Dmitri Medvedev, “On all these issues, but particularly
missile defense, this can be solved. But it is important for
[Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my
election I have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded, “I will
deliver this information to Vladimir.”
As Sen. Jon Kyl
translated in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “It
appears the president is willing to compromise our own
missile-defense capabilities to secure Russian support for another
round of nuclear-arms reductions.” Martin Peretz
further translated in the Journal last Friday:
But really the message, the important one, concerns us here in
America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the
president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly,
that the American people are not trusted by their own President.
Otherwise the President would tell us the truth about his
intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own
people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to
thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President
Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against the American
body politic.
It should have been obvious that President Obama was never going
to follow through on his promises to Senate Republicans to get his
New Start Treaty ratified, as those promises were contrary to his
long standing positions throughout his political career. This is
why Republicans in the Indiana primary on May 8 should vote out
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, who led the
roundup of sufficient Republican votes in the 2010 overwhelmingly
Democrat Senate to give Obama his treaty ratification victory. In
the past, Lugar was a solid Republican. But the 80-year-old Senator
now seeking his seventh term has lost control of his staff, which
robotizes him in favor of critical votes for the dangerous Obama
agenda.
America’s Nuclear Suicide
Obama’s
literally crazy idea is that if we just lead by example and phase
out our nuclear weapons, everyone else will realize we mean them no
harm, and do the same. As a result, because of the messiah, the
lion will lie down with the lamb, and the world will live as
one.
As Gaffney further explained, “He evidently is prepared to take
such a step unilaterally in order to encourage by our example other
nations to join his long-standing ambition to ‘rid the world of
nuclear weapons.’”
The problem is if President Obama is reelected, he as the
commander-in-chief would be free to carry out this flower child
policy on his own authority, without Congressional approval. As
Gaffney further explained in the March 27 Washington
Times, “Mr. Obama’s subordinates are signaling, however, that
he is prepared to disarm us unilaterally through what one of them,
Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, recently called
‘executive action.’”
Gaffney rightly concluded in his February 22 column, “It is an
astonishing insight into the President’s commitment to
‘fundamentally transforming the United States of America’ — in the
worst sense of the phrase — that he is willing to take such steps
in the midst of his reelection campaign. Imagine what he would do
if the last vestiges of restraining accountability are removed in a
second term.”
In these modern times, a full blown nuclear war would be over in
a matter of days. America will not have four years to build up the
arsenal of democracy if caught by surprise. A dew-eyed
miscalculation on these matters literally threatens your very life,
and the lives of your family and children.
That is why not only President Obama must be held accountable
for this national defense foolishness, but the entire Democrat
party that supports and enables him. That includes his
contributors, whose names are publicly available, and his voters.
This is a Paul Revere moment. The survival of you, your family and
your nation is at stake, far more so than even on that April night
in 1775. Exercise your rights of freedom of speech and democratic
participation while you still have them, indeed, while you are
still alive.
