Posted by
Gabrielle Cusumano on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 11:30:21 AM
Will Obama Give Up America’s Nuke First Strike?
Posted: 11 May 2009 10:08 PM PDT
President Obama wants the world to get rid of its nukes, eventually. But, for now, it’s still official U.S. policy that America reserves the right to drop the first Bomb in an atomic war.
During the early 1980’s — the peak of the late Cold War — the Soviet Union declared that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Many of America’s strategic lions — most famously Robert McNamara, George Kennan, Gerard Smith, and McGeorge Bundy — said we should do the same. But we never did. Why not? Primarily because we thought we might actually use the weapons first. In my view, one of the three most likely ways that World War III would have started would have been with Red Army troops surging west across Europe. American conventional weapons probably couldn’t have helped the French or West Germans stop them. But nuclear weapons could have.
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