Someone Page Eric Cartman -- The Hippies Are Loose

I had this overwhelming desire to scream the word "Go home, Hippie!" when I read this...

President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.


But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.


Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.


Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.


It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.


Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.

Preserving those tools should not include making useless self-limiting statements simply so you can look good to the bureaucrats of the world community. I'm happy if the world never sees another nuclear blast. But I refuse to think it deters anyone or serves U.S. interests to say that our default response to a biological or chemical weapons attack would not include nuclear retaliation. I'm starting to wonder if the President wants our future military endeavors to end up like the battles between G.I. Joe and Cobra on the animated TV series, where pilots always parachuted to safety from planes that got shot down, and laser fire never hit anyone.