For Obama, deep anti-nuclear roots
As a student, he sought arms cuts
NEW YORK - At a dark moment of the Cold War, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear-free world.’’ He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities’’ that “suit the military-industrial interests’’ with their “billion-dollar erector sets,’’ and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.
The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced “the twisted logic of which we are a part today’’ and praised student efforts to realize “the possibility of a decent world.’’ But his article, “Breaking the War Mentality,’’ said little about how to achieve the utopian dream.
Twenty-six years later, the author, in his new job as president of the United States, has begun pushing for new global rules, treaties, and alliances that he insists can establish a nuclear-free world.
“I’m not naive,’’ Obama told a cheering throng in Prague this spring. “This goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.’’
No previous American president has set out a step-by-step agenda for the elimination of nuclear arms. Obama is starting relatively small, using a visit to Russia that starts tomorrow to advance an intense negotiation, with a deadline of the year’s end, to reduce the arsenals of the nuclear superpowers to about 1,500 weapons each.
In an interview yesterday, Obama stressed that “I’ve made clear that we will retain our deterrent capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons.’’
But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms, a step sure to upset Pakistan, India, and Israel.
Even before those battles are joined, opposition is rising.
“This is dangerous, wishful thinking,’’ Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.
They contend that Obama is, indeed, a naif for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.’’
