One of the country’s most experienced and knowledgeable experts on nuclear deterrence, Vice Admiral Robert Monroe, has called on the Senate to reject Barack Obama’s so-called New START Treaty – and the agenda for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament of which it is the leading edge. In a brilliant op.ed. in today’s Wall Street Journal, Admiral Monroe explains that there is more riding on the upcoming Senate debate than just the disposition of a defective arms control treaty.
In fact, according the former Director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, nothing less than the future viability of America’s arsenal is on the line. As Adm. Monroe puts it: “The nuclear deterrent that has kept us safe for over half a century cannot be maintained under the Obama administration’s limitations.”
Those limitations are enshrined in an ideologically driven Nuclear Posture Review issued just before the START treaty was signed. They include: barring the design and production of any new nuclear weapons, prohibiting any realistic testing of the existing, obsolescent ones (in fact, just today, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced that it was changing the name of the only facility for conducting such testing underground – the historic “Nevada Test Site” – to the “Nevada National Security Site,” signaling Team Obama’s determination to turn it into a giant sandbox for anything but nuclear testing business), and devaluing the “mission” of nuclear weapons and those responsible for maintaining them.
Adm. Monroe rightly warns that “Unless the Senate supports such nuclear disarmament, it must deny ratification to New START, which is the first step in that direction.”
We all better pray that at least 34 Senators do not support such reckless unilateral disarmament of the United States in a world in which even the Iranians have a more active and more modern nuclear weapons program than we do.
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