While I am strongly opposed to some of President Obama's views regarding
abortion, embryonic stem cell research and the gay and lesbian agenda, it
seems that we do have some common ground when it comes to the issue of the
non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Following is a rather informative news article from the New York Times. A
few paragraphs which I found particularly interesting are the following,
because I have been saying the very same thing for a number of years now:

----- Begin Quotes -----

"It's naive for us to think," he said, "that we can grow our nuclear
stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our
allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we're
going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to
pursue nuclear weapons themselves."

"The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs," the
organization quoted Mr. Obama as saying, "and any attempt by the U.S.
government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S.
nonproliferation efforts around the world."

"I don't think I was that unique at that time," the president said of his
Columbia days, "and I don't think I'm that unique today in thinking that if
we could put the genie back in the bottle, in some sense, that there would
be less danger -- not just to the United States but to people around the
world."

----- End Quotes -----

Following is the article in its entirety:


Obama's Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER - NYT

July 4, 2009


In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University
wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of "a nuclear free
world." He railed against discussions of "first- versus second-strike
capabilities" that "suit the military-industrial interests" with their
"billion-dollar erector sets," and agitated for the elimination of global
arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.

The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his
thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced "the twisted logic of which we are
a part today" and praised student efforts to realize "the possibility of a
decent world." But his article, "Breaking the War
Mentality," which only
recently has been rediscovered, said little about how to achieve the utopian
dream.

Twenty-six years later, the author, in his new job as president of the
United States, has begun pushing for new global rules, treaties and
alliances that he insists can establish a nuclear-free world.

"I'm not naive," President Obama told a cheering throng in Prague this
spring. "This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my
lifetime. It will take patience and persistence."

Yet no previous American president has set out a step-by-step agenda for the
eventual elimination of nuclear arms. Mr. Obama is starting relatively
small, using a visit to Russia that starts Monday to advance an intense
negotiation, with a treaty deadline of the year's end, to reduce the
arsenals of the nuclear superpowers to roughly 1,500 warheads each, from
about 2,200. In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Obama, conscious of his
critics, stressed that "I've made clear that we will retain our deterrent
capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons."

But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving
the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the
nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and
Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms, a step sure to
upset Pakistan, India and Israel.

Even before those battles are joined, opposition is rising. "This is
dangerous, wishful thinking," Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and
Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled
Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.
They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naif for assuming that "the
nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed
or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent
forces."

In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move
forward in a turbulent world.

"It's naive for us to think," he said, "that we can grow our nuclear
stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our
allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we're
going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to
pursue nuclear weapons themselves."

Realist or dreamer, Mr. Obama has an interest in global denuclearization
that arises from what can best be described as a lost chapter of his life.
Though he has written two memoirs, he has volunteered few details about his
two years at Columbia.

"People assume he's a novice," said Michael L. Baron, who taught Mr. Obama
in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy around
the time he wrote the Sundial article. "He's been thinking about these
issues for a long time. It's not like one of his advisers said, 'Why don't
you throw this out?' "

In a paper for Dr. Baron, Mr. Obama analyzed how a president might go about
negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians -- exactly what he is
seeking to do this week.

At critical junctures of Mr. Obama's career, the subject of nuclear
disarmament has kept reappearing. Now both he and his agenda face the
ultimate test: limiting nuclear arms at the very moment many experts fear
the beginning of a second nuclear age and a rush of new weapons states --
especially if Iran proves capable of making atomic warheads.

The Seminar

"I personally came of age," Mr. Obama wrote in "The Audacity
of Hope," his
second memoir, "during the Reagan presidency."

It was a time when President Ronald Reagan began a trillion-dollar arms
buildup, called the Soviet Union "an evil empire" and ordered scores of
atomic detonations under the Nevada desert. Some Reagan aides talked of
fighting and winning a nuclear war.

The popular response was the nuclear freeze movement. Dozens of books warned
that Mr. Reagan's policies threatened to end civilization and most life on
Earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park, their
placards reading "Bread Not Bombs" and "Freeze or
Burn." The nation's Roman
Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter denouncing nuclear war.

Many Columbia students campaigned for the freeze movement, which sought a
halt to additional nuclear arms deployments. Mr. Obama explored going
further.

In the interview, Mr. Obama noted that he was too young to "remember having
to do drills under the desk." But as a student "interested broadly in
foreign policy," he recalled, he focused on "a central question: how would
the United States and the Soviet Union effectively manage these nuclear
arsenals, and were there ways to dial down the dangers that humanity faced?"

In his senior year, he began Dr. Baron's seminar on presidential
decision-making in American foreign policy. The first semester, starting in
fall 1982, covered such cold-war flashpoints as the Cuban missile crisis --
a dramatic study in the decision-making style of President John F. Kennedy.
In the second semester, students focused on particular topics, and Mr. Obama
wrote a lengthy paper about how to negotiate with the Soviets to cut nuclear
arsenals.

"His focus was the nature of the strategic talks and what kind of
negotiating positions might be put forward," Dr. Baron said. "It was not a
polemical paper -- not arguing that the U.S. should have this or that
position. It was how to get from here to there and avoid misperception and
conflict.

"He got an A," recalled Dr. Baron, who now runs a digital media business.
Later, he wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School.

It was during that seminar that Mr. Obama wrote his Sundial article,
profiling two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against
Militarism. Photographs with the March 1983 article showed students at an
antiwar rally in front of Butler Library.

The Article

Mr. Obama's journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called "the
relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country" amid "the
growing threat of war." The two groups, he wrote, "visualizing the
possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted
national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the
dead-end track."

Despite Mr. Obama's sympathetic portrayal of the two groups, the article
seemed to question the popular goal of freezing nuclear arsenals rather than
reducing them, the topic of his seminar paper. Mr. Obama wondered if the
freeze movement "stems from young people's penchant for the latest
'happenings.' "

What clearly excited him was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty,
which would have ended the testing and development of new weapons, and thus,
in the minds of arms controllers, the nuclear arms race.

The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the treaty. One Columbia
activist, Mr. Obama wrote, argued that the United States should initiate the
ban "as a powerful first step towards a nuclear free world."

That phrase -- a "nuclear free world," which was Mr. Obama's paraphrase --
would re-emerge decades later as the signature item of his nuclear agenda.




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