If the United States is going to have any credibility in arguing that other countries must restrain their nuclear ambitions, it must restrain its own, said International Herald Tribune in a recent editorial. Excerpts:
President George W. Bush, and his aides, could hardly wait to get rid of all those tiresome arms-control treaties when they took office.
They tore up the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty to make way for a still largely pie-in-the-sky missile defense system. They opposed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and never made a serious effort to win a ban on the production of fissile material (the core of a nuclear weapon).
Bush grudgingly signed his one and only arms-reduction treaty with the Russians in 2002. That means that today — 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands ready to launch within minutes.
The bad news, of course, didn’t stop there. While Bush and his team were ridiculing treaties and arms control negotiations as “old think,” North Korea tested a nuclear device, Iran has been working overtime to produce nuclear fuel (usable for a reactor or a bomb) and many other countries are weighing whether they need to get into the nuclear game. President Obama pledged to address these dangers when he was campaigning. In her recent confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued that America’s best hope of doing that is to restore treaties and a rules-based system. Now they have to translate that lofty intent into urgent action.
