MLK had a wonderful dream, but Obama ebrraces utopian pacifist fantasies

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Barack Obama's Nuclear Naivete

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 10/2/2007

Leadership: Barack Obama says if elected president he'll implement a plan to eradicate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. A beautiful dream, but you might as well try to abolish all non-nuclear weapons.

It was meant to sound new, but it's an idea we have heard from pacifists for many decades — "No nukes!"

Democratic candidate Obama, introduced by John F. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorenson at DePaul University in Chicago, unveiled his "Kennedyesque" plan to bring JFK's original efforts to limit nuclear weapons proliferation to its logical conclusion.

On the fifth anniversary of his speech opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Illinois senator proposed a global ban on the production of fissile material for weapons and a series of other restrictions.

Ivo H. Daalder of the Brookings Institution, Obama's Dutch-born senior foreign policy adviser and a former Clinton National Security Council member, said the senator was challenging "the conventional thinking on nuclear weapons in Washington . . . that we need to keep nuclear weapons for all sorts of contingencies."

But why shouldn't the U.S. have options for any and every contingency? After Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a swift end to the bloodiest war in history and prevented the need for an invasion of Japan that would have meant the death of millions of Americans and Japanese, this country enjoyed a nuclear weapons monopoly in the world. We could have easily blackmailed any other power — the whole rest of the world, in fact.

But we did not. Instead, we allowed Russia to steal our technology, develop its own bomb and subject humanity to decades of living under the shadow of mutual assured destruction — proving to the world that it has nothing to fear from the U.S. having nuclear bombs.

Obama, however, has hooked onto the utopian vision of a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-written in January by former Republican Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn.

Whatever hawkish credentials that lot might like to wave around, their worldwide nuclear-free zone of the future depends on what they call "changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons."

Which is to say, it depends on "changes in the disposition" of any potential enemy of liberty that could ever master the technology of uranium enrichment, or get hold of nuclear materials or hardware still missing in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

It's worth noting that in Douglas Brinkley's new book, "The Reagan Diaries," an entry by the late president from as recently as January 1987 noted that Shultz was "adamantly opposed" to going beyond the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in developing an anti-nuclear missile defense. So much for Shultz's powers of foresight.

Shultz, his fellow co-authors and Obama are all guilty of crossing their fingers and hoping for diplomatic miracles. "To signal the dawn" of a new era of diplomacy, according to Obama, "we need a president who is willing to talk to all nations, friend and foe."

Unfortunately, talk will never make the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon — or the knowledge to make a gun or conventional bomb — go away. Preventing nuclear war won't be achieved through embracing pacifist fantasies.

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