Panetta Says No "Unilateral" US Nuclear Cuts: What We're Reading Now
Mar 28, 2012
U.S.
Panetta Says No 'Unilateral' US Nuclear Cuts
Associated Foreign Press - March 27, 2012
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said there would be no "unilateral" reductions in the US nuclear arsenal, after President Barack Obama said his country had more of the weapons than it needed.
Obama's Slip Won't Let Russia Veto Europe Missile Defense
Bloomberg - March 26, 2012
President Barack Obama got caught Monday talking with the microphone left on - again. This time he was telling Russia's outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev that it would be better to leave talks about NATO's contentious missile defense system until after U.S. elections in NOvember, when Obama would have "more flexibility."
Republican Presidents' Efforts to Reduce Nuclear Arms
Nickolas Roth, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation - March 27, 2012
President Obama was recently overheard saying to Russian President Medvedev that, assuming he prevails in the election this November, he would have more flexibility to negotiate on arms control issues. In response, some Congressional Republicans have implied that President Obama may have secret plans to aggressively pursue arms control in his second term.
Nuclear Conference in Korea Collides With U.S. Election: What We're Reading Now
Mar 27, 2012
Korean Peninsula
Nuclear Conference in Korea Collides With U.S. Election
Mark Landler, New York Times - March 27, 2012
Politics, diplomats like to say, stops at the water’s edge. But this week, the politics of the presidential election crashed into a nuclear security summit half a world away.
North Korea: Odd Man Out, Yet Everywhere
Ben Feller, Associated Press - March 26, 2012
The White House called North Korea the odd man out. President Barack Obama counted it back in
Bland Nuclear Summit Communique Seeks "Safer World"
Reuters - March 27, 2012
World leaders gathered in Seoul for a two-day nuclear security summit released a bland statement on Tuesday reaffirming the need to work harder to ensure a "safer world for all".
Those Were the Weeks that Were: Nuclear Spring
Apr 14, 2010
A poster from Kazakhstan promotes a nuclear weapons free world during the security summit in Washington, DC.
Stepping back from the past few frantic days on nuclear weapons issues, it is useful to realize how much has been accomplished. The last two weeks have arguably been the two most eventful weeks on reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons since the advent of the nuclear age.
• On March 29, President Obama, together with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, announced that the U.S. and Russia had reached agreement on the “New START” nuclear reductions treaty.
• On April 6, the United States released the results of a year-long review of nuclear weapons, called the Nuclear Posture Review.
• On April 8, Presidents Barack Obama and Dimitry Medvedev signed New START in Prague, Czech Republic.
• On April 12-13, the President convened leaders of 47 countries to agree on steps needed to secure and safeguard vulnerable nuclear materials and to cope with the worldwide terrorist threat.
Critics will point to shortcomings in the treaty, the nuclear review and the Washington summit. The millennium has not come and nuclear weapons will not disappear the day after tomorrow. Iran and North Korea continue to break the rules. There remain about 23,000 nuclear weapons across the globe, most much larger than those used against Japan in 1945.
But there has been significant forward movement that had been lacking over the past two decades.