An indispensable insurance policy

Forty-four nations are now in Washington, the biggest international gathering
since the Second World War to talk turkey on nuclear weapons.  

This comes on the heels of the president’s signing a new nuclear arms pact with
the Russians and an announcement last week that he was engaging in a new
nuclear posture review, which is a fancy way of saying he wants a new nuclear
strategy. 

He wants to get rid of them.

I get that President Obama really doesn’t like nuclear weapons. And I
understand that we have to be vigilant in keeping nuclear weapons out of the
hands of terrorists.  

But my guess is that you don’t need a big summit to get most of the civilized
world on board with the idea that we should keep nuclear devices away from the
bad guys.  

I am not an expert on nuclear strategy. I took a few classes on it back in
college, when we all thought that a nuclear war could come at any time. But
what I do remember about the history of the weapon leads me to believe that it
is not necessarily in our national strategic interest to scrap our nuclear
weapons.  

Since we first used the bomb in 1945, there haven’t been any total wars of the
kind that shook the world in 1914 and 1940. The wars have been limited in
scope, and fairly limited in cost, and I think that is because we have what
used to be called the A-bomb.  

We have the world’s most feared nuclear arsenal. As Teddy Roosevelt used to
say, speak softly, but carry a big stick. Well, we have had the world’s biggest
stick since we first developed the big stick in the mid-’40s.  

If someone else gets that big stick first, say the Nazis or the Soviets, well,
then, we have a different world out there today, a much meaner, nastier world,
with much less freedom, much less prosperity, much less English being spoken. 

So now the president wants us to eventually get rid of our big stick. 

And replace it with what? A smaller, more efficient conventional force, I
guess. 

Since the president signed the healthcare bill, the writing is on the wall. More
money to be spent on healthcare, bigger domestic government, higher payments to
poor people and less money spent (on a percentage basis) on the military. 

And with less money spent on the military, the president also wants to get rid
of our nuclear arsenal, which is our big stick. I don’t think I like where this
is going. 

The president, obviously, is not particularly comfortable with the idea of
American power. He thinks that America all too often acts as a bully. And at
times, maybe we do. But there are bullies and then there are bullies. The
Russians are real bullies. The Chinese are real bullies. The Americans? Well, not
so much. 

I guess the problem that I have about this nuclear freeze summit (or whatever
you want to call it) is that it gathers a bunch of countries together that
either want our big stick or want us to get rid of our big stick. 

The Russians, who live in this fantasy world that we are somehow their chief
rival for world domination (sorry, guys, you have already lost out to the
Chinese, the Indians and the Brazilians), want to put Obama in a strategic box.
They want him to agree to get rid of our nuclear weapons so they have an excuse
to get rid of some of theirs, because, well, they can’t afford to keep them up
anymore. 

But our nuclear weapons play the same role that all the gold plays in Fort Knox
and in the New York Fed. The weapons are an insurance policy, just in case the
whole world decides to collapse into chaos.

We shouldn’t seek to get rid of that insurance policy. We should keep up the
premiums and make certain we do everything we can to ensure that we don’t have
to use them in an emergency.  

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