BrianGarst.com

Barack Obama will today roll out new rules describing official U.S. policy on the use of nuclear weapons.

Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.

…It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.

I haven’t entirely made up my mind on these changes, yet. On the one hand, I think it makes sense to provide an incentive for nations not to pursue nuclear weapons.  I’m also open to the idea that our arsenal of conventional weapons can provide a sufficient deterrent in many cases. We do have very impressive weapons, after all. However, if we’re going to be relying more heavily on such weapons, we probably ought to be looking to spend more on them, rather than less.

Other parts of the President’s apparent agenda on nuclear weapons concerns me. His continued stated desire to aim for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons is simply naive.  You can never eliminate the knowledge of how to create nuclear weapons, and abandoning our own stock entirely would only encourage more nations to try and establish themselves as world’s dominant military power by building their own.  The world, and America, is safer for our having at least some nuclear arms.