nuclear-news

Obama now has a chance to start cutting nuclear weapons

The search for a nuclear legacy Why Barack Obama may now be able to start cutting nuclear weapons The Economist, Feb

23rd 2013.……..Bruce Blair, co-founder of the Global Zero movement which campaigns for reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons, believes that Mr Obama could set in train a process which would in time also lead to big cuts in the stockpiles of non-strategic and non-deployed nukes. Neither has any military usefulness, but nobody pretends getting there would be easy, particularly as tactical weapons remain more important to Russia—with its comparatively weak conventional forces—than to America.

But the prize for reducing stockpiles would be the chance to draw other nuclear states with much smaller arsenals, such as China, into a multilateral negotiation. That “holy grail”, as Mr Blair calls it, will not be reached, if ever, until well after Mr Obama has gone. But if he could claim to have started the quest, it might be just the legacy he yearns for. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21572195-why-barack-obama-may-now-be-able-start-cutting-nuclear-weapons-search-nuclear

February 22, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA