Wishful Thinking: Curbing Babylon The Great (Dan 7)

 

New report argues for narrowing role of nuclear weapons in US policies, diplomacy and forces

May 17, 2015 | By Dibya Sarkar

The United States should minimize the role that nuclear weapons play in its security policy because they add few military options and provide “false hopes” that can be costly geopolitically as well as in human lives, according to a new report from the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

The report (pdf) released May 14 recognizes that nuclear weapons are “indispensable” to deter other nations from attacking the U.S. and allies with such weapons, but they offer no other advantage over the conventional military superiority that the U.S. enjoys over every other nation.

The report’s co-authors are Barry Blechman, a national security expert and co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and Russell Rumbaugh, who is a special assistant in the Defense Department.

“These false hopes that nuclear weapons can play a range of political and military roles in U.S. security policy cause the United States to mistakenly pursue a nuclear strategy that is costly – not only in material terms, but also in geopolitical terms,” they write. “In the worst case scenarios, this strategy could be catastrophic in terms of human lives and the nation’s future.”

The authors outline in greater detail why nuclear weapons offer no military or political benefit beyond nuclear deterrence by examining U.S. conventional military superiority and offering an alternative that would serve U.S. interests better.

They write that the U.S. should fashion its diplomacy, nuclear policies and force posture – meaning current force capabilities – around pursuing negotiated arrangements to create a “verifiable international regime eliminating nuclear weapons globally.” The U.S. should also adopt policies declaring the U.S. belief of the “narrow utility” of such weapons and focus its “force structure solely on maintaining a secure, second-strike capability.”

“After seventy years of indulging fantasies of what nuclear weapons can do, it is high time to acknowledge that they do very little and adapt US nuclear policy, strategy, and forces to those facts,” concluded Blechman and Rumbaugh.