Reagan was Wrong, Obama is Right
In the 1980's President Reagan called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Now in 2009 President Obama has renewed Reagan’s call. Would the United States of the 1980's have been safer without nuclear weapons? No, President Reagan was wrong. Would the United States of today be safer without nuclear weapons? Yes. President Obama is right. To appreciate this change, it is useful to look back to a time when a similar transformation in weapons’ systems took place. Say the end of the middle ages.
For centuries the noblemen of Europe ruled the common people literally with an iron hand. Their soldiers had armor and the peasants did not have a way to penetrate it. This insurmountable advantage for the well born was brought to an end by the English long bow. Here was a weapon any skilled peasant could make and master, a weapon that was capable of shooting a projectile through armor. Suddenly a Duke could not to totally disregard the wishes of the great unwashed.
Likewise, for 50 years nuclear weapons were the means to trump large armies in the same way that the long bow trumped armor. The Soviets had much bigger armies in Europe than the allies, the Chinese outnumbered everyone in Asia, but we had nuclear weapons and we were committed to use them first before we would lose a conventional war of major consequence. The fact that our major foes had nuclear weapons too, meant that the weapons acted as a mutual deterrent to war. In fact, it seems highly likely we would have had a conventional war with the Soviets in Europe if the confrontation had not happened in the nuclear age. When President Reagan called for ending nuclear weapons in the 1980's, most of our foreign policy establishment feared that our leader did not understand this important strategic reality.
Today is different because of two major changes in the power realities. First, we do not need nuclear weapons to be to have an almost insurmountable strategic edge. Second, nuclear weapons are proliferating in ways that weaken our confidence in mutual deterrence.
Once the major advantage enjoyed by highly-developed nations was possession of the skills and the resources to build a nuclear weapon. However, today, the singular advantage of being the most advanced military power is the ability to create “smart weapons”: stealth bombers, smart bombs, and unmanned weapon systems. These weapons have become so effective that no army of any size can challenge America in a large scale war. The balance started to tilt away from large armed forces in the first gulf war. Until then bombing in advance of a great battle still left the heavy lifting to the men with boots on the ground. However in the first gulf war the invading coalition troops found an enemy which had been totally decimated by weeks of pinpoint devastation by smart bombs. Then Clinton worked America’s will in the Balkans with an all air effort. Rumsfeld used a similar approach in the early days of the war in Iraq. The strategy was totally effective in destroying Sadam’s conventional armies.
Today, at the moment that we do not need nuclear weapons to have a major strategic advantage, we find that America can no longer have confidence in deterrence to protect us from mass destruction by nuclear weapons. This was addressed in President Obama’s call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Slow and steady proliferation is putting these weapons in the hands of unstable governments and thereby increasing the likelihood that one day a terrorist group will get their hands on them. The possibility of a nuclear retaliation to a nuclear attack is more likely to be an inducement than a deterrent to a suicide bomber. This grim reality should motivate all developed nations to find the means to create a nuclear free world and while leading by example does not guarantee success, being willing to eventually give up our nuclear weapons is an important tool in convincing emerging nations to forgo developing their own nuclear arsenal.
That is why hard headed realists such as Henry Kissinger believe that America must move to turn the tide which now carries nuclear proliferation forward. In 2009, this is not a struggle which pits idealists against realists. It is a battle waged by clear-thinking realists against an outmoded mind set which increases the likelihood that nuclear weapons will end up in the hands of organized madmen.
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AuthorPhil Merrill lives in Appleton, Maine. ArchivesCategories |