Mission Statement

This blog is dedicated to tracking current events and developments that exemplify, support or discredit the
themes of City, Save Thyself! Nuclear Terror and the Urban Ballot.

Friday, February 19, 2010

A Not-Good-Enough Speech

Vice President Biden gave a widely noted speech this week at the National Defense University, aimed to promote support in the military community for the U.S.-Russian START negotiations. More power to him, but the speech shows how hamstrung national leaders are when it comes to arms control.

Instead of getting right to the heart of it - the immense, compelling danger, he thought he had to buy the audience’s attention by describing the Administration’s arming initiatives, the interest shown by some Republicans in arms control, and stirring in patriotic blather.

Dr. Barry Blechman, co-founder of the Stimson Center, reviewed the speech in the New York Times today. He called the speech an example of piecemeal control efforts and demanded that we “think more boldly if we are to achieve global nuclear disarmament.” He offered a plan, proposing that all of the nuclear states make cuts, the U.S. and Russia first, and the others at specified dates and levels. If one state bogged down the others would halt the process. If international verification revealed a serious violation, a collective force would destroy offending sites and even dislodge the ruling regime.

Trouble is, the nations will never do this. Hiroshima was sixty-five years ago. The nations have accommodated to the permanence of these horrible weapons. Consider, it is probably for a brief time only that we have a President who even wants to restructure the security system.

Arms control strategists need to broaden their scope and bring new agencies into play, new power centers through which the strangle hold on national policies, by militarists, weapons industries, and mutually hostile ideologists, might be broken.

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