Dreams of Disarmament 04/08/2010 Wall Street Journal Original Source: – HYPERLINK http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/0302/Bluster-at-UN-Human-Rights-Council-as-US-and-Iran-trade-barbs http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303411604575168093038150042.html If diplomatic activity equalled disarmament results, President Obama would soon be delivering a nuclear-free world. On Tuesday, his Administration released its Nuclear Posture Review, setting new limits on the potential U.S. use of nuclear weapons. Today, the President is in Prague to sign an arms-control treaty with Russia, called New Start, which will reduce the U.S. arsenal by 30%. Next week, he'll host a 47-nation summit on nuclear security in Washington. And next month it's on to the U.N. conference on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT. Mr. Obama has little doubt that all of this nuclear busyness strengthens the security of the U.S. and our allies. In an interview Monday with the New York Times, the President stressed the importance of the NPT in curbing proliferation, including making sure that the United States was abiding by its obligations under the treaty to reduce its own arsenal. He added that when you're looking at outliers like Iran or North Korea, they should see that over the course of the last year and a half we have been executing a policy that will increasingly isolate them so long as they are operating outside of accepted international norms. *** This would be lovely if it were true, but the history of the nuclear era offers different lessons. One is that the NPT has done relatively little to discourage nuclear proliferation: India and Pakistan joined the nuclear club by staying outside of the treaty, as did Israel, though its nuclear program reportedly predates the NPT. North Korea has been an on-again, off-again signatory to the treaty, without that having the slightest effect on its nuclear program. Syria was a member in good standing of the NPT when an Israeli air strike destroyed its illicit nuclear reactor in 2007. Iran remains a member of the treaty, having secretly violated its terms for 18 years and openly violated them for another seven. A second lesson is that the NPT invites multiple opportunities to cheat by insisting that all states, including those suspected of violations, have a right to civilian nuclear technology. As Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center reminds us, so long as there is some conceivable civilian application [for a nuclear technology], and the offending activity or material is admitted to or declared to international inspectors, the international community ultimately presumes what it senses to be suspect must be treated as if it was peaceful and legitimate and, therefore, unactionable. This is one lesson of the Atoms for Peace folly of the 1950s. To the extent that more states haven't gone nuclear, the reason has been U.S. power, not a treaty. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Canada could build a bomb in a week, but instead they have long relied on America's nuclear umbrella to deter aggressors. A credible U.S. nuclear deterrent is the world's greatest antiproliferation weapon. As for New Start, its most striking trait is its Cold War mentality. The pact emphasizes the relative size of the U.S and Russian arsenals, as if a nuclear exchange between these two countries is the world's greatest current threat. The treaty is thus of little strategic consequence, though the Senate should ask why its ceiling on 800 U.S. launchers (many of which now carry conventional payloads) is below the 860 that the Pentagon prefers. More worrisome is Mr. Obama's announcement that he is overruling Secretary of Defense Robert Gates by refusing to develop a new nuclear warhead, even as the reliability of our aging arsenal is increasingly in doubt. In that context, New Start might do some good if its requirement for a two-thirds Senate ratification vote gives a determined minority the political leverage to force Mr. Obama to modernize our arsenal. Mr. Obama says the power of New Start's example will somehow encourage Iran and North Korea to give up their ambitions, but there is no evidence to believe this. Those countries have only increased their efforts to gain nuclear weapons since the Cold War ended, even as the U.S. and Russia have been reducing their stockpiles. What would do far more good is a loud and clear declaration that the U.S. and Russia will by whatever means necessary stop Iran from gaining a nuclear military capability. In his Times interview, the President also mentioned the example of Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, who was pursuing nuclear weapons for quite some time until suddenly [he] decided the costs outweighed the benefits. Yes, but why? Mr. Obama didn't say that the Libyan dictator fessed up a week after Saddam Hussein was pulled from his spider hole by the 4th Infantry Division. *** We have been jousting with the arms-control crowd long enough to know that their claims are more theological than practical. And so it seems to be with Mr. Obama, who has been arguing the merits of disarmament since his days as a Columbia University undergrad. He really does seem to believe that if we don't build it, the rest of the world won't either. As we look at history, we prefer the wisdom of 20th-century writer Walter Lippmann, who observed that the disarmament movement of the 1920s and 1930s had been tragically successful in disarming the nations that believe in disarmament. Lippmann wrote that in 1943, when the illusions of arms control had been all too horribly revealed.