Nukes

In 1988, disgruntled former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan revealed that since the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, Nancy Reagan had consulted a San Francisco astrologer for advice on scheduling the president.  This went well beyond merely affecting the start times of meetings.  As anyone who has worked for or covered a White House knows, where the president goes, who he meets with, and when, are ultimately matters of policy.  The revelation understandably caused a firestorm.  How could anyone possibly base policy on something so frivolous?

Watching foreign diplomats run circles around America’s striped pants set is always a depressing spectacle. In recent days we’ve been treated to some doozies—for instance, Iran being elected to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women when our own (female) U.N. ambassador didn’t show up for the vote.

President Obama noted at the beginning of April that the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)—along with the recent nuclear security summit, next month’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference and the pursuit of additional UNSC sanctions—is part of a message that “the international community is serious about Iran facing consequences if it doesn’t change its behavior.” The updated NPR, among other things, limits the scenarios under which the U.S. would use nuclear weapons; violators of the NPT are viewed as exceptional cases and receive no immunity from U.S. nuclear strikes meant to deter conventional or chemical and biological attacks. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said: “if there is a message for Iran and North Korea [in the NPR], it is that if you're going to play by the rules, if you're going to join the international community, then we will undertake certain obligations to you, and that's covered in the NPR. But if you're not going to play by the rules, if you're going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.”  It is unlikely that these messages—intended to “allow Iran to make a different kind of calculation,” according to President Obama—have thus far made the regime feel isolated or persuaded it to change its behavior, based on the responses and actions of the regime.

A leading Iranian cleric, reports Reuters, is blaming earthquakes on female promiscuity. "Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi told worshippers in Tehran.

This may sound wacky, but it can teach us a serious lesson. The question it poses is: How well do we understand the thinking of the Iranian leadership on questions small and large? Here are some words of a caution from a CIA study:

Remember the two missiles defense sites—one in Poland, the other in the Czech Republic—that the Obama administration cancelled last fall as a goodwill gesture to Russia?  The stated rationale at the time was: Since the sites were intended to defend America and our allies from Iranian missiles, and our intelligence estimated that the Iranians were a long way from fielding such missiles, the sites were unnecessary.

Now, this was a transparently flimsy excuse even at the time.  If we believed (which we did then and do now) that Iran is determined to develop ICBMs, then why wait?  It takes time to build interceptor and radar sites and make sure they work properly.  Is the right time to begin only after the threatening country has in hand the capability which the installations are intended to counter?

At exactly the same time that President Obama’s anti-terrorism theatrics are going on in Washington at the nuclear security summit, a pro-terrorism party is going on in New York at UN Headquarters. The trouble is that the states play-acting in D.C. are swinging in New York in the opposite direction.

In Washington, the summit advertisement reads as follows: “Dedicated to nuclear security and the threat of nuclear terrorism.”  In New York, the UN’s “ad-hoc committee on measures to eliminate international terrorism” is gathered to talk about drafting the world’s first comprehensive convention against terrorism.  For the fourteenth time in ten years.

Kazakhstan's leader has given permission to the commander in chief to allow U.S. military planes to fly over his country en route to Afghanistan. This was the result of a meeting President Nursultan Nazarbayev held at the White House with President Barack Obama yesterday. That's one accomplishment -- perhaps the only accomplishment? -- of this Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C.

Trying to prevent terrorists from obtaining nukes should be national security priority number one. But the Obama administration's plan to combat that threat is puzzling. They've argued ad nauseam that arms reduction treaties like START are the key to keeping loose nukes out of the hands of terrorists. That's absurd. START limits nuclear weapons on bombers, submarines, and ballistic missiles -- these bombs are large and restrained by failsafe mechanisms and unlock values which make them nearly impossible to detonate. In six decades of nuclear custody, there has never been a theft of such a device in either the United States or Russia (though a few have been lost, mostly in bomber crashes during the 50s and 60s).

Arthur Herman has a must-read piece on Iranian nukes: "The Islamic revolutionary regime in Tehran is poised to hand the United States its worst foreign-policy setback since the fall of South Vietnam."

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.

On March 26, President Obama announced that the United States had reached a new strategic arms agreement with Russia. He explained that the new nuclear-arms treaty strengthens “our global efforts to stop the spread of these weapons, and to ensure that other nations meet their own responsibilities.”

The timing of the Russian-American agreement, and Obama’s urgency in signing it next week in Prague, is directly linked to these global efforts. For come this May, nuclear non-proliferation will be the subject of a major international conference—a review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—at which the new treaty will be held up for all to emulate.

From the AP : “Saudi Official Cool to New Sanctions on Iran.”