Council for a Livable World

As Kingston says over at Nukes of Hazard, maybe John should take out a second office over at Russia Today. Yesterday John was returned to the program to discuss some of the issues delaying a new START agreement and President Obama’s commitment to maint…

While most news coverage of the President’s State of the Union address has focused on jobs, the speech included some very important promises on nukes:

Even as we prosecute two wars, we are also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people — the threat of nuclear weapons. I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them. To reduce our stockpiles and launchers, while ensuring our deterrent, the United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades. And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring forty-four nations together behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

We need to make sure this issue continues to receive the attention it deserves. Important decisions are being made in the next four weeks and you can make your voice heard.

Please write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper telling them we can’t let the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons fall off the national agenda!

President Obama is in the midst of finalizing a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that will decide America’s direction and priorities on nuclear weapons issues for many years to come. Will he heed the growing bipartisan consensus among military and security experts that the only solution to the threats posed by nuclear weapons comes through moving toward their elimination? Or will he allow the inertia of Cold War thinking to continue to put our nation in danger?

You can help the President make the right decision by publicly calling on him to fulfill the promises he made in Prague and those he reiterated last evening in his State of the Union address.

Write a letter to the editor of your local paper! Explain how the Nuclear Posture Review will set the direction for U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the next 5-10 years, and how the administration must seize this opportunity to take a global leadership role on reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.

We need to make sure that voters understand that reducing nuclear arsenals increases U.S. security. Raise your voice and tell them how negotiating immediate reductions in nuclear weapons stockpiles is essential to making Americans safer. And it is a key step toward the goal we all support of a nuclear weapons free world.

Please send us a copy of your submission, and let us know if your letter gets published.

Last night, John was interviewed on Russia Today t.v. on START. Watch the video to hear about what’s at stake in the negotiations, the expected timeline for signing and ratifying the treaty, what the negotiations mean for the international community,…

An article in the Washington Independent today, in which I’m quoted, points to one – particularly glaring – problem with President Obama’s proposed spending freeze: Why does the proposal exclude defense spending?

From the piece, by Spencer Ackerman:

But while Obama did not rule out future defense cuts in the speech, many of these defense wonks could not understand why an effort at deficit reduction would explicitly exclude defense spending. “Defense spending is over half our discretionary spending,” Olson said. “It would be crazy not to include it. It begs the question whether this is a real effort.” Shortly before the speech, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the House, told reporters that any spending freeze ought to include defense spending.

[snip]

Still, Todd Harrison, an defense-budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he believed the combination of massive defense budgets, massive federal deficits and a weak economy would inevitably compel Congress and the president to cut defense. “It’s likely in the future that everything will come under pressure, defense included,” Harrison said. But he conceded that a variable in that calculation is “political will” for such cuts — which is not in evidence in either the White House or, especially, the Congress, which loves to send defense money back home to individual states and districts.

Also today, Fred Kaplan writes that, “If some Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1982, woken up in 2009, and looked at the U.S. military budget as an indicator of what was going on in the world, he would assume that the Cold War were still raging.”  He notes that, while every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget should not be subject to a spending freeze, there is certainly a large chunk that should.

While the focus of President Obama’s first State of the Union address was overwhelmingly centered on job creation and reviving the economy, his remarks regarding nuclear weapons reiterated the Administration’s commitment to leading a bipartisan nuclear security agenda that addresses the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons.

As he identified in the speech, the President has adopted the visions of former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in pursuing meaningful steps to reverse the proliferation of nuclear weapons and seek a world without them.

Some highlights:

•    Significant progress is being made in negotiations for a follow-on to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a key agreement for reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and Russia, which expired on December 5th. (In fact, just hours before giving the State of the Union, the President spoke with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and the leaders agreed that the negotiations for “the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades” are nearly complete.)

•    U.S. leadership in strengthening the non-proliferation and disarmament regime is essential to garnering international support to halt the North Korean and Iranian programs.

•    He established a clear goal for the April Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC of “securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.”

As the chairman of our sister organization, Lt. Gen. Robert Gard identifies, “Nearly every national security expert agrees that terrorist use of nuclear weapons against the United States is our gravest security threat. The best way to address the threat of nuclear terrorism is by securing vulnerable nuclear materials and verifiably reducing nuclear stockpiles.”

While there is still much work to be done, last night’s State of the Union reaffirmed President Obama’s commitment to the bipartisan efforts to do just that.