Arms

David Gregory mocked the NRA's Wayne LaPierre for proposing that armed guards be at every school in America. But the NBC host seems to have no problem with armed guards protecting his kids everyday where they attend school in Washington, D.C.

"You proposed armed guards in school. We'll talk about that in some detail in a moment. You confronted the news media. You blamed Hollywood and the gaming industry. But never once did you concede that guns could actually be part of the problem. Is that a meaningful contribution, Mr. LaPierre, or a dodge?," asked Gregory.

An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot.

George Kennan, the celebrated architect of U.S. Cold War doctrine, called arms control policy during the 1920s and 1930s a species of wishful thinking and a vapid distraction from the serious business of responding to the international threats that culminated in World War II. Contemporary U.S. arms control increasingly reflects the characteristics lamented by Kennan.

In a Politico op-ed today, Congressman Michael Turner (R, Ohio) criticizes the Obama administration’s lack of transparency on its controversial study of future reductions to America’s nuclear deterrent—including one option that would cut the arsenal by 80 percent, down to as few as 300 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. 

During the decades of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, successive U.S. administrations yearned for regime change.

A delegation of the People's Liberation Army, the largest group of Chinese military officers ever to visit the United States, recently toured the Pentagon and other U.S. defense facilities. Part of their mission was to further erode and finally end the congressional ban on weapons and technology sales to China imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre of peaceful demonstrators on June 4, 1989.

On Monday, September 13, the Associated Press and other media outlets reported that the Obama administration will ask Congress for approval to sell Saudi Arabia up to $60 billion worth of high-tech fighter aircraft and helicopters, with an option of $30 billion in naval armaments to follow. Because of the Iranian threat, the deal is expected to be approved, since it will give the Saudis military striking capacity across the Gulf region.

In the aftermath of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, the UN inserted a peacekeeping force of 11,000 troops from 31 nations. According to the UN resolution authorizing the mission, its purpose was to block the flow of weapons to Hezbollah and keep Hezbollah from operating south of the Litani River, near Israel’s northern border.

With healthcare reform behind him, President Obama has turned his attention to what is perhaps his number one foreign policy priority: nuclear disarmament. On April 6, the Obama administration released a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) report, outlining U.S. nuclear weapons strategy. The NPR is not the dramatic document that some on the left had hoped for, but in a sop to Obama's base, does revise U.S. declaratory policy to limit the instances in which the United States will use nuclear weapons. The NPR also fails to outline a clear path to warhead modernization, something that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said is essential to ensuring the reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the coming decades.