NUCLEAR EXPERTS DEBATE VALUE OF DISARMAMENT

By ExchangeMonitor

A pair of experts yesterday urged the Obama Administration to put the brakes on future reductions to the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, suggesting at a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing that such moves would have little impact on nonproliferation and efforts to dissuade Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons. “There is no relationship between U.S. policy toward nuclear disarmament and what they are likely to do with their nuclear arsenals,” former Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Rademaker, who was joined in opposition to further stockpile reductions by Kory Schake of Stanford’s Hoover Institute on the panel. “We could cut our nuclear arsenal in half, we could eliminate all our nuclear weapons, but it would not translate into diminished interest on their part to have nuclear weapons.”

Subcommittee Chairman Michael Turner (R-Ohio) has used that logic before in calling for the Obama Administration to curtail its plans for further stockpile reductions beyond the 1,550 strategic deployed warhead cap. “There is no evidence our moral leadership in arms control and disarmament will convince countries to set aside their calculations of the impact of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism on their national security, and help us address these threats,” Turner said. However, former Clinton Administration nonproliferation official Thomas Graham suggested that it was essential for the five nuclear weapons powers around when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was negotiated to move toward disarmament to fulfill the vision of the treaty. “The elimination of nuclear weapons is a policy for the longer term. Everyone recognizes that,” Graham said. “For that to ever happen, it’s important that the NPT hold together in the interim. Unless the basic bargain is better observed, in my mind there is a substantial possibility that it will not” hold together.

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