US president issues warning to leaders but says that since first summit six years ago, the world has taken ‘concrete, tangible steps’ to reduce nuclear terrorism.
“The United States and Russia remain on track to meet our
New START Treaty obligations so that by 2018 the number of deployed American and Russian nuclear warheads will be at their lowest levels since the 1950s,” the President
wrote in a Washington Post op-ed this week, referring to the unwieldily named Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.
(Zahid said the threat of nuclear terrorism which has a big impact on world security is the main topic of discussions at the Nuclear Security Summit. This was because the threat of nuclear terrorism was not a concern of one country alone, but had become global concern as global security was a very important matter. Therefore, he said world leaders' attention and concerns over this issue are vital.)
The only reason he can claim that the number of weapons is as low as it’s been since the 1950s is because the number has been
steadily dropping since the last throes of the Cold War in the 1980s, when they had well over
23,000 active weapons. But the reduction has almost nothing to do with his administration.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the US had gone from 4,950 operational nuclear warheads in 2010, the year the New Start Treaty was signed, to 4,700 weapons in 2015. That’s a reduction of less than 1%. (By the way, 4,700 nuclear weapons are more than enough to destroy the planet several times over).
Judging from the
numbers collected by FAS, the US reduced its nuclear weapons stockpile at a much faster pace under George W Bush than under President Obama, where the US cut its active weapons from over 10,000 in the year 2000 to just over 5,000 by the time Bush left office.
So when Obama says, “I’ve reduced the number and role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” like he did in the Washington Post, he’s referring to a drop in the ocean.
It’s also curious that he’s claiming he reduced the “role” of nuclear weapons in the United States’s national security strategy, considering
the administration has indicated that the US government would spend over $1tn over the next few decades to “modernize” its nuclear weapons program.
Instead of retiring or destroying weapons that are out of date, they will be spending a massive amount of money to make sure the mass killing machines survive decades longer and that they are easier to use.
Many
experts also think that, by “modernizing” these weapons of mass destruction – by making them smaller and more “targeted” (if that phrase can be used to describe weapons that can level entire cities) – they will be more tempting to use in future military conflicts.
It’s also an underhanded way of violating the president’s vow not to build new warheads while still being able to technically claim that they are abiding by it. Yet Obama conveniently left any mention of this “modernization” plan out of his
sunny Washington Post op-ed.
Certainly Obama should be proud of the nuclear deal his administration struck with Iran, as the president has repeatedly mentioned in the lead-up to this week’s conference. It’s one of the few positive foreign policy developments in the last several years: a vast majority of nuclear proliferation experts think the deal will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
And, maybe even more importantly, it will severely reduce the chances that the US will go to war in yet another large Middle Eastern country in the near future.
But to proclaim that they are any closer to a nuclear-free world is just spouting falsehoods.
