nuclear-news

“More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build, or steal one,” Obama continued. “Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.”

Taken in the context of his other campaign promises—the closure of Guantanamo, (which has only truly blossomed in the twilight hours of his presidency) and the end of the two costly wars he inherited—Obama’s nuclear promise seemed both heroic and unimpeachable, especially given its tacit support by past foreign policy luminaries. Mere months after his Prague address, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize—a symbolic endorsement of his nascent doctrine—with the Nobel Committee specifically citing the “special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”………

The minute things went south with Russia, the United States went back on it’s promise to work toward a nuclear-free world.But six years later, in a book released last year, the former Pulitzer director wrote that the prize “didn’t have the desired effect” of helping to catalyze such change. He’s not wrong. The Obama administration certainly made historic steps in unifying the international community on the issue of nuclear weapons, particularly the historic nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries. But at the same time, despite promises to pursue new restrictions on nuclear technology and decrease the nation’s nuclear stockpile, the American military’s nuclear posture has remained largely static. Obama’s dream of non-proliferation is, it seems, long dead………

Obama’s nuclear budget has swollen in recent years. In his proposed $620.9 billion defense budget for 2017, Obama called for a $1.8 billion increase in nuclear spending “to overhaul the country’s aging nuclear bombers, missiles, submarines and other systems,” according to Reuters. The budget request allocates millions in taxpayer dollars for the development of a new nuclear-tipped cruise missile, replacing the military’s arsenal of air-launched missiles, and almost doubling the military’s nuclear cruise missile collection to nearly 1,000 missiles—all initiatives seemingly in contradiction to the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and Obama’s early-term non-proliferation rhetoric. And this isn’t a sudden change, but the latest jump in nuclear arms spending at the cost of non-proliferation efforts since 2011, according to reporting from Mother Jones.

Data from the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation shows a steady increase in nuclear spending in Obama’s defense budget since 2012, all while non-proliferation spending has been on the decline:

“What’s more problematic is the decrease in nuclear nonproliferation programs by over $100 million,” Global Zero executive director Derek Johnson wrote for the Hill. “These are highly functional programs dedicated to keeping the world’s nearly 16,000 nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands and locking down vulnerable nuclear material…. In a global security climate traumatized by the rise of ISIS, decreasing nuclear nonproliferation programs seems a dangerously misguided trade-off.”………

In retrospect, we should have known better. In his Nobel address, Obama didn’t just lay out a doctrine that would define his foreign policy; he delivered a masterclass in doublespeak, using the validation of his campaign rhetoric of a utopian, nuclear-free world while recognizing the permanent reality of modernrealpolitik and nuclear terrorism. And while the promise of a nuclear-free world is an inherently naïve proposition, his doctrine of just war was prescient: Obama has expanded the field of battle against terrorism with a deadly drone program while in turn touching off a “modernization” arms race with Russia, as the Interceptputs it.

The administration is trumpeting its success with Iran—and with good reason—but Obama’s record on nuclear weapons is hardly an affirmation of his Nobel Peace Prize. The dream of a world without nukes, it turns out, was always really just that: a dream, and nothing more. http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/broken-nuclear-promise-of-barack-obama