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USA’s far right leads to new global nuclear arms race

…suddenly we are in the midst of a new multi-polar arms race. This is the vision that Romney is posing and it is immensely dangerous.

Mitt Romney Embraces The Far Right’s Dangerous Nuclear Extremism In Opposing START, Wonk Room, 6 July 2010, While Mitt Romney’s oped today in the Washington Post is largely a politically-motivated effort to boost his far-right foreign policy bonafides, it does however demonstrate how dangerous and extreme the anti-Obama narrative has become……

The fact that Romney thinks that the worst foreign policy mistake of the Obama administration is a modest treaty that reduces limits on nuclear weapons and extends and updates the verification and monitoring measures that Ronald Reagan himself negotiated in the initial START treaty, says something about how far out of the mainstream the conservative right has moved.

But moreover this vividly shows that there is an emerging civil war within the Republican establishment. This treaty has unanimous support from the military and is supported by senior and respected Republican foreign policy officials from every Republican administration of the last 40 years, including Nixon and Ford administration officials (Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger) Reagan administration officials (George Schultz, Frank Carlucci), Bush Sr. administration officials (Brent Scowcroft, James Baker) and George W. Bush administration officials (Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell, and Linton Brooks). Opposition to this treaty puts Mitt Romney and the far right fringe that has seemingly taken over the reigns of the Republican foreign policy to the extreme right of even Ronald Reagan……………..

what is never expressed and is conveniently missing in the op-ed is the alternative vision to the START treaty that Romney is proposing. That vision is nuclear anarchy. Rejecting START means eliminating the treaty that has ensured nuclear stability between the US and Russia in the post Cold War era. START’s collapse would also likely break the back of the brittle nuclear non-proliferation regime, which rests on a fragile bargain between nuclear and non-nuclear states…………..suddenly we are in the midst of a new multi-polar arms race. This is the vision that Romney is posing and it is immensely dangerous.

Wonk Room » Mitt Romney Embraces The Far Right’s Dangerous Nuclear Extrem

July 7, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | antinuclear, disarmament, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear spin, nuclear weapons