GLOBAL ZERO FOUNDER WISHES OBAMA ‘HAD DEVELOPED A PLAN’ FOR REDUCTIONS

A founder of the Global Zero movement to eliminate all nuclear weapons yesterday criticized the Obama Administration’s approach so far toward its stated goal of a nuclear-free world. Bruce Blair of Global Zero said that the group’s goal can only be realized with a comprehensive long-term plan. “You don’t get there by a kind of Lewis and Clark expedition of incrementalism that is without a plan. You have to have some ambition and some kind of a plan to move from where we are today to get to zero,” Blair said yesterday at a Brookings Institution event. He added, “It’s an urgent agenda, and it’s the President’s agenda. I wish that he had developed a plan instead of basically bouncing around a bit from one objective to another.”

Blair noted that in 2010 Global Zero released an action plan for its goal that was developed by an international commission of lawmakers, diplomats and other officials. He said that Obama should “instruct his bureaucracy to flesh out the implications of getting to zero in, say, half a century or less.” That would include levels and impacts on forces, the national laboratories, the Y-12 plant, and the impacts on the life extension program. “How do we get Russia, the United States and all the other countries with nuclear weapons into a process that could lead to staged verifiable reductions from where we are today to zero?” Blair asked. “I think that’s a plan that has yet to be formulated and is one that is essential to be figured out.”

However, at the Brookings event, National Institute for Public Policy President Keith Payne was highly skeptical of efforts to cut the number of U.S. nuclear weapons.  “I’m very concerned about numbers driven by an arms control ethos that says that anything lower is okay, when reductions can, I believe, degrade our ability to deter, degrade our ability to extend deterrence and degrade our ability to assure allies,” he said. “The degradation of those capabilities for those goals would be anything but a positive development.”