Text Ticker: No Nukes
Steve Coll at the New Yorker comments on Obama’s new nuclear reduction policy. Apparently he has some surprising allies:
Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Sam Nunn are among the Cold War-era defense hawks who have preceded Obama to an embrace of nuclear abolition. Even so, it is commonplace to criticize this vision as naïve, since the goal is unlikely to be achievable anytime soon. This criticism distorts the abolitionist movement’s work; its supporters do not generally waste time on speculative debates about when and how a world containing precisely zero nuclear weapons might eventually be created. Instead, they want to drive down the world’s nine nuclear arsenals to much smaller sizes as quickly as possible—perhaps to the tens or low hundreds of weapons, in the case of the United States—and, while doing so, to make nuclear weapons as illegitimate and impractical as possible.
At the end, Coll adds an optimistic note about the recent decree that American soldiers’ caskets can once again be photographed:
On April 5th, also as a result of a decision by the Obama Administration, television cameras recorded the arrival at Dover Air Force Base of a casket containing the remains of Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers, of Hopewell, Virginia, who was killed in Afghanistan. For the past eighteen years, the military has banned the media from witnessing the arrival home of a soldier killed overseas, even if the soldier’s family wished otherwise. No more. These caskets, too, are Obama’s inheritance. Gradually, the President is fashioning a turn in national-security policy—by insisting, first of all, on an end to denial.
