ANOTHER BAD SIGNAL TO SEND - AT 9:26 P.M. ET:  As the president gets ready to go the UN and reach out and touch someone, there is news of still one more change in our national defense that could prove worrisome.  This is from the Guardian of Britain, a leftist paper, but the story seems credible:

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.

Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Those options include:

• Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.

• Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.

• Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.

All these points are cause for concern, but the third is particularly troubling.  We are the only nuclear power that has not modernized its arsenal.  Our nuclear warheads are from a past generation. 

The US nuclear posture review is aimed at clearing the path for a new round of deep US-Russian cuts to follow almost immediately after that treaty is ratified, to set lower limits not just on deployed missiles but also on the thousands of warheads both have in their stockpiles.

The Obama strategy is to create disarmament momentum in the run-up to the non-proliferation treaty review conference next May, in the hope that states without nuclear weapons will not side with Iran, as they did at the last review in 2005, but endorse stronger legal barriers to nuclear proliferation, and forego nuclear weapons programmes themselves.

COMMENT:  Look, every sane person worries about nuclear weapons.  Ronald Reagan was deeply concerned about the possibility of an accidental nuclear war.  But the idea of abolishing all weapons by treaty is absurd.  As long as the knowledge to build weapons exists, someone can cheat.  Are you really willing to trust the Russians to go down to zero?  The Chinese?  The Pakistanis?  The Iranians?

We can probably reduce the number of warheads safely, as long as we maintain a modern, strategic deterrent and strategic force.  But the president, while playing to the disarmament crowd, might want to play a bit to the national defense community and approve what our military experts have been urging for years - the building of a new, reliable generation of warheads to insure our security.  So far he hasn't, and that endangers America and tempts enemies.

Nonsense like "exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads" begs the point.  That has probably been done, without success.  Why not do what every other nuclear power has done, and modernize our arsenal? 

Once again we get the leftist approach to national defense, and I won't sleep easier tonight knowing that.

September 21, 2009