Obama and Clinton Team Up Against Nukes
ByI’ve been dreaming of this kind of foreign policy initiative since I was a teenager in the Reagan years. Want to make America and the rest of the world safer? Reduce the number of nuclear weapons on the planet.
Times UK: President Obama will convene the most ambitious arms reduction talks with Russia for a generation, aiming to slash each country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons by 80 per cent.
The radical treaty would cut the number of nuclear warheads to 1,000 each, The Times has learnt. Key to the initiative is a review of the Bush Administration’s plan for a US missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, a project fiercely opposed by Moscow.
Mr Obama is to establish a non-proliferation office at the White House to oversee the talks, expected to be headed by Gary Samore, a non-proliferation negotiator in the Clinton Administration. The talks will be driven by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
10 Comments
February 4th, 2009 at 11:49 am
1000 nukes can still do a lot of harm. It’s a giant step in the right direction, though. Dubya really dropped the ball on nonproliferation. Wiki says there are maybe 10,000 active warheads in the world now (and lots more that are just disassembled); in 1985, there were 65,000 warheads.
Two years before that, in 1983, we came as close to an accidental war as any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
1.) President Reagan, early in his reign, acted like a dangerous, heedless war nut. The Reds noticed. A very typical indicator of his attitude (though from 1984, not ’83) is the famoust bombing joke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_minutes_speech
2. In November 1983, after various provocations, NATO conducted a war exercise which the Soviets thought might be a mask for a real attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_archer
3.) But even before that, in September 1983, Soviet early warning computers indicated five American missiles en route. Our collective asses were saved by a Soviet lieutent colonel, who suspected a false alarm and refused to respond. Raise a glass to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
In this years edge.org question, “What would change everything?” physicist Max Tegmark replies, “Accidental nuclear war.” http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_8.html#tegmark As Tegmark notes, there are multiple safeguards, so the chance is small, “Yet if we roll the dice enough times, shit happens…”
The whole point of nuclear weapons is to negate the imbalance of power caused by large conventional armies. We shouldn’t have those either.
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February 4th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Yes, 1000 is closer to 0!! No nukes will save the planet a lot quicker than anything else. While it will take along time to erase everything that Bush did, Reagan is truly the one that started all of this crap with the Nukes — and that may never be stopped completely.
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February 4th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Between his warmongering arms race and trickle down economy philosophy Reagan has done so much harm to the people of this great nation. It eludes me why he is held by R’s in such high esteem.
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February 4th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Must…not…give…in…
(But you know you want to. Go ahead; one little post won’t kill you. You gonna let these dirtbag pinkos get away with all this horseshit? They are attacking the Gipper, after all. Buckner? He’s as commie wacko as they come. Or that kraut with the guilt complex, you know, the Kai Sprockets or whatever his name is? Huh? He needs a whooping. He likes it! Come on, now just one eensy-weensy post. Everybody’s doing it.)
No! Must resist…Please…[command-w}
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February 4th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Kai:
Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.
How did such a shit president manage that?
Basically, he bought off the big media and eliminated the Fairness Doctrine. He bought off the big media by changing the rules to allow media companies to grow much larger. See for example: http://www.corporations.org/media/
Quote: “In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. (snip) In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.” Before 1996, a corporation could only own 7 AM and 7 FM stations; a 1996 law relaxed this. SO it’s not all Reagan’s doing, but he had a huge effect.
The other part is the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
Essentially, the Fairness Doctrine meant that if (for example) a TV station had an editorial in the evening news, and you disagreed, they had to have you on the next day to give your view. I remember this from childhood. THe last few minutes of the news were usually Amateur Hour, when some nervous citizen in an ugly suit who never was in front of a camera before would stammer his/her dissent to yesterday’s editorial. I was just a kid, I didn’t realize what a beautiful thing this was until it was gone. Now our airwaves are filled with shitshitshit like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly who brainwash millions in a way that simply wasn’t legal forty years ago. And one thing Rush Limbaugh has been saying over and over in his years of druggy fascist propaganda is:
Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.
And millions of listeners assume it must be true since it’s on the radio every day, right?
So repeat after me:
Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.Reagan is a Saint and One Of The Greatest Americans Ever Ever Ever.
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February 4th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
MM,
Thank you for the compliment. I am proud to be a pinko. In fact I am so much of a pinko that my blood is actually red!
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February 4th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Michael,
Resistance is futile. Unleash the comment beast!
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February 4th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Thanks Tom,
the first thing I ever learned about Reagan was how he/his people went behind President Carter’s back and negotiated with the Iranians to NOT release the US embassy hostages until after the election. That is really all I ever needed to know about him, what a slimeball.
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February 4th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Ronald Reagan was pretty good in The Killers.
There. I said something nice about Ronald Reagan. That wasn’t so hard.
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February 4th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Looked up the movie link. Seems Reagan played a mobster. What a stretch.
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