In his new budget, President Obama has asked the Pentagon to cut the United States nuclear arsenal by a whopping 80%. This move would reduce our nuclear arsenal from 5,000 to only 300 or 400 weapons. Although having good intentions, this move is a misguided mistake that is based upon a faulty line of reasoning. If indeed these cuts are approved, the security and safety of the United States will be in serious peril.
Destroying our nuclear arsenal will not stop other nations and groups from producing their own. Pictured: a US nuclear missile.
To justify cuts in nuclear arsenals, liberals like President Obama argue that having fewer of these weapons in the US will make the world a safer place. However, this is utterly false. Most developed nations possess large arsenals of nuclear weapons for their own protection, and as the years pass, more and more nations are enjoying access to nuclear technology and weaponry. The spread of nuclear technology is too widespread for the United States to suppress, and because of this, any reductions in US arsenals will not be reciprocated by other nations.
Reducing the nuclear arsenal of the United States will have immediate and devastating impacts upon the ability of our nation to defend itself. The politics of nuclear weapons largely center upon the concept of MAD, or mutually assured destruction. Under this theory, two nuclear powers do not attack each other with nuclear weapons due to the imminent threat of complete and utter annihilation on both sides. However, this theory only remains valid if both nuclear powers keep large nuclear arsenals that can effectively blanket the territory of the opposing power and wipe them off the face of the earth. Should one nation abandon nuclear weapons or slash their arsenal dramatically, annihilation would no longer be a concern for the other nation, and thus the nuclear option would be much more tempting in a time of crisis.
In a speech in Prague back in 2009, President Obama called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons around the world. Although this is surely a noble objective, it is an unrealistic and naive one as well. Nuclear weapons are already widely disseminated throughout the world, and even if all of the nuclear powers in the world participated in a massive global weapons drawdown, nuclear technology would still exist. If Iran or another dictatorial nation illegally acquired or produced long-range nuclear weapons in this scenario, nations like the United States and even Russia would be powerless to stop a massive reign of terror in the Middle East by Iran, which would use its nuclear capability to destroy Israel and subjugate the entirety of the Middle East under its radical Islamic control. A comparative analogy to this is to the Ottoman Empire during the early modern era. As Western Europe developed new military and industrial technologies during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, conservative Islamist leaders in the Ottoman Empire saw this new technology as impure and unnecessary. In their rejection of the most advanced technology of the time, the Ottoman Empire – formerly the hegemonic power of Europe – entered a period of social, economic, and political decline and was disparagingly titled the “sick man of Europe” by other rapidly advancing European nations. Inevitably, the Ottomans’ technological inferiority forced them to depend upon other nations for their protection, and thus the formerly great Ottoman Empire lost its power and authority in the world to other European nations like Britain and France.
The best way to keep America safe is to do what the Ottomans refused to do a few hundred years ago. We must expand our current nuclear arsenal and embark upon a program of modernization to eliminate old, defunct weaponry and to create new, more powerful weapons for our arsenal. This, not utter disarmament, will keep America safe in a world of growing danger.
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