The article was lost for years -- some of Mr. Obama's campaign advisers said
they had heard of its existence and went looking for it, presumably to see
if it contained anything that might prove embarrassing. It came to light on
the Internet just before the inauguration, and some conservative bloggers
called it naive, anti-American and blind to the Soviet threat.

Precisely how the article found its way onto the Internet is unclear. But
late last year, a Columbia alumni publication said it had learned of it from
an alumnus, Stephen M. Brockmann, who also had an article in the same
Sundial issue. Dr. Brockmann, now a professor of German at Carnegie Mellon
University, said he found the issue "while rummaging through some old
stuff." When he saw the Obama article, he recalled, "I could hardly believe
my eyes."

The Senator

After the Sundial article, Mr. Obama went silent on nuclear issues for the
next two decades. In Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer,
topics like remaking the schools, the welfare system and health care seemed
a lot more urgent. The cold war ended. So did the protests.

But in 2003 Mr. Obama began his unlikely campaign for the United States
Senate and answered a detailed questionnaire from the Council for a Livable
World, an advocacy organization in Washington that evaluates candidates on
arms control issues.

"He opposes building a new generation of nuclear weapons," the organization
said in a fund-raising letter supporting Mr. Obama's candidacy. At the time,
the Bush administration had proposed developing nuclear arms that could
shatter deeply buried enemy bunkers.

"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."

The organization said Mr. Obama also supported an American-financed effort
to secure Russian nuclear arms, as well as ratification of the Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, still in limbo two decades after Mr. Obama wrote
about it.

When he became a senator in January 2005, Mr. Obama zeroed in on arms
control, an issue with little traction in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Mark Lippert, now chief of staff of the National Security Council, recalled
the senator's seeking his nuclear views when he applied for a Senate staff
job.

Mr. Obama found a mentor in Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana,
then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime star
of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. Later that year, Mr. Obama asked to
accompany his Republican colleague on a trip to monitor Russian efforts to
scrap nuclear arms and secure atomic materials from theft or diversion.

"When we got there, he was clearly all business -- a very careful listener
and note taker and a serious student," Mr. Lugar recalled.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama seized a new opportunity, and
political cover, by aligning himself with four of the biggest names in
national security. They had decided to campaign for the elimination of the
nuclear arsenals they had built up and managed as cold warriors.

There were two Republicans, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz,
secretary of state under Mr. Reagan, and two Democrats, William J. Perry,
secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, and former Senator Sam
Nunn, who has made fighting proliferation his life's work.

In a 2007 opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, the four men argued
that the time was right to seek "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons," as the
headline put it. President George W. Bush never invited them to the White
House to make their case.

But Mr. Obama embraced the four wholeheartedly, echoing their message in
campaign speeches in places like Chicago and Denver and in Berlin, where he
spoke in July 2008 as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"This is the moment," he told cheering Berliners, to seek
"the peace of a
world without nuclear weapons."

The President

The nuclear world Mr. Obama studied and wrote about at Columbia bears little
resemblance to the one he faces today.

Russia in many ways is the least of his challenges. Both Washington and
Moscow want to renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires late
this year, and both say they want to shrink their arsenals.

More complex are problems posed by the rise of new nuclear states, chiefly
North Korea, which has now conducted two nuclear tests, and Iran, which
experts say will be able to build a warhead soon, if it cannot already.
Pakistan has the fastest-growing arsenal, India's is improving, and Israel's
nuclear capacity has never been publicly discussed, much less dealt with, by
the United States.

The threat, Mr. Obama added in the interview, has "only been heightened with
the emergence of extremist organizations such as Al Qaeda."

Mr. Obama and his aides say they want to address all these issues -- though
they have only recently begun to discuss strategy.

"We tried the unilateral way, in the Bush years, and it didn't work," a
senior administration official said recently. "What we are trying is a
fundamental change, a different view that says our security can be enhanced
by arms control. There was a view for the past few years that treaties only
constrained the good actors and not the bad actors."

Beyond the first step -- deep cuts in American and Russian arsenals -- is an
agenda that has already provoked stirrings of discontent at home and abroad.

In January, in the journal Foreign Affairs, Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates, the lone holdover from the Bush cabinet, called for financing a new
generation of longer-lasting and more dependable nuclear arms.

He was immediately overruled. Mr. Obama's first budget declared that
"development work on the Reliable Replacement Warhead will cease."

Another focus of activity early this year was the Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Its ratification faces a tough Senate fight. But
his aides are already building a case that advanced technologies obviate the
need to detonate weapons as tests of the American arsenal and can verify
that other countries also refrain.

Critics argue that the North Koreas of the world will simply defy the ban --
and that the international community will fail to punish offenders.

"If the implications were not so serious, the discrepancy between Mr.
Obama's plans and real-world conditions would be hilarious," said Frank J.
Gaffney Jr., a Reagan-era Pentagon official who directs the Center for
Security Policy, a private group in Washington. "There is only one country
on earth that Team Obama can absolutely, positively denuclearize: Ours."

Even more ambitious, Mr. Obama wants a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which
would bar all nations that sign it from making fuel for their atom bombs.
But when asked how Mr. Obama would sell the idea to America's allies --
primarily Pakistan, India and Israel -- administration officials grow
silent.

All this is supposed to culminate, next year, in an American effort to
rewrite crucial provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Mr.
Obama wants to strengthen inspection provisions and close the loophole that
makes it easy for countries to drop out, as North Korea did in 2003.

Each of those steps would require building a global consensus. It would also
mean persuading countries to give up the coveted freedom to make fuel for
reactors -- and instead, probably, buy it from an international fuel bank.

Most of all, Mr. Obama and like-minded leaders will have to establish a new
global order that will truly restrain rogue states and terrorist groups from
moving ahead with nuclear projects.

"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."



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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