OBAMA URGED TO TAKE NUKES OFF ‘HAIR-TRIGGER’ ALERT

President Obama should order the nation’s nuclear arsenal off “hair-trigger,” Washington Post columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel said in a Jan. 21 column outlining “a few dramatic and long-overdue actions” Obama could announce in the State of the Union address next week. The actions could help Obama “lead more forcefully in areas vital to the country and popular with the people” midway through his second term, vanden Heuvel wrote. “To this day, the United States and Russia have several hundred missiles ready to launch at a moment’s notice,” vanden Heuvel wrote. “Even George W. Bush considered this an ‘unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation.’ George H.W. Bush unilaterally took hundreds of missiles and bombers off alert. Obama could make good on his own promise and issue a long-overdue executive order that would make the planet far less dangerous.”