The Patriot Post® · Obama's Latest Effort to Disarm America

Apparently Barack Obama views his willful decimation of our Army, Navy and Air Force — even as threats from Islamic terror, Russian/Iranian ambitions, Chinese adventurism, and North Korean belligerence continue to metastasize — as insufficiently devastating. In what is best described as a “two-fer” of intellectual and moral bankruptcy parading itself as forward thinking, the commander in chief is seeking a new United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at banning nuclear testing, and contemplating the adoption of a “No First Use” (NFU) policy with regard to America’s nuclear arsenal. In short, this is a pathetic attempt to replace rational and necessary military deterrence with the delusions of the 1960s No-Nuke Flower Children.

Obama wants the UN initiative to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In 1996, America was the first nation to sign the agreement that prohibited all nuclear weapon testing and explosions, but the Senate rejected its ratification in 1999. While theoretically laudable, such a treaty requires complete cooperation to be effective. As it has indicated on at least four separate occasions, North Korea did not get the proverbial memo.

And as usual, Obama sees congressional approval of his schemes as an impediment rather than a requirement. Thus it is no surprise Obama did not consult with the legislative branch of government before making his decision to move forward. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-TN) was irate. “This is a plan to cede the Senate’s constitutional role to the UN. It’s dangerous and it’s offensive,” he said. “Not only is this an affront to Congress, it’s an affront to the American people. It directly contradicts the processes that are in place to make sure that Congress appropriately weighs in on international agreements.”

Corker has no one to blame but himself and his equally feckless Senate colleagues who collaborated with Obama’s contempt for Congress when they adopted the Corker bill facilitating Obama’s disastrous Iran deal. That bill turned the constitutionally mandated two-thirds vote for the ratification of a treaty on its head, sealing the deal for Obama when the Senate couldn’t muster up a two-thirds vote to stop him.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) notes, “The administration’s intention to once again not use the constitutional process of ratification in the Senate, choosing the undemocratic method of going to an international organization to circumvent the democratic process, is precisely what happened between the U.S. and the Ayatollah.”

That’s what happens when a despicable precedent is set. One the Senate approved by a whopping 98-1 margin, with only lone dissenter Tom Cotton of Arkansas attempt to prevent the Senate’s abject surrender.

There were several good reasons why Congress rejected the CTBT in 1999 that remain relevant. It doesn’t clearly define what it supposedly bans; America’s nuclear arsenal has grown weaker in the intervening years, while Obama has imposed dangerous limits on modernization programs; a zero test ban remains unverifiable; and rogue nations continue to develop their capabilities.

As national security expert Baker Spring explains, this defiance “suggests that the Obama Administration’s moral suasion argument is ineffective and that Iran and North Korea view the U.S. commitment to nuclear disarmament as a sign of weakness to be exploited.”

Nonetheless, Obama will not only pursue his reckless agenda, he will double down with the even worse NFU agenda that literally requires the United States to absorb a nuclear attack first, before being able to employ any aspect of our nuclear arsenal.

For years the American Left, using the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an ostensible underpinning for their argument, has insisted any use of our nuclear arsenal constitutes a moral obscenity. Thus it was not surprising Obama used the occasion of speaking in Hiroshima in May to advocate unilateral disarmament, insisting that “among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”

And what about those nations that don’t have such “courage?” That is precisely what our current status of ambiguity with regard to the use of nukes is all about.

This NFU nonsense was first proposed by JFK in a 1961 speech. Nikita Khrushchev’s attempt to install missiles in Cuba, along with the realization it encouraged Russia to believe they could conquer Western Europe, subsequently engendered more realistic thinking.

Such realism is called deterrence, and without ambiguity it doesn’t exist.

Furthermore, as the Washington Times explains, deterrence isn’t simply about nuclear exchanges. “Advocates of the ‘no first use’ policy also miss the fact that current policy helps protect us from many types of large-scale attacks,” the Times states. “Biological and chemical weapons can be as lethal and destructive as a nuclear weapons attack. Even a well-executed cyberattack … could place our nation in a vulnerable position that would forever alter our way of life. To declare that the U.S. will retaliate with nukes only if attacked with nuclear weapons is to ignore a spectrum of crippling scenarios that adversaries would ponder more freely should the ‘no first use’ policy be implemented.”

That Obama and the American Left would abide such possibilities and frame them as “courage to escape the logic of fear” is the real moral obscenity being contemplated here.

An obscenity amplified when one considers the alternative. While the Left has pontificated for decades about the “devastation” inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it calculatingly ignores the consequences of the alternative, a large scale assault on the Japanese mainland. Now-declassified documents of “Operation Downfall” reveal Navy Department personnel estimated American losses between 1.7 and four million with 400,000 to 800,000 deaths, and as many as 10 million Japanese casualties. The estimated number of casualties from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined were 199,000.

Furthermore, perhaps someone in our morally comatose media might ask the president which particular part of America he’d be willing to sacrifice to a nuclear holocaust as a pre-requisite for attaining the “moral high ground” apparently necessary for responding in kind. Perhaps he could also explain what he thinks the more than 30 allies who currently rely on the U.S. nuclear deterrent — though they are technologically capable of developing their own arsenals — might do in the absence of U.S. assurances of protection going forward.

“The fact is that leaving the first-use option on the table has kept the peace among nuclear powers since World War II,” explains columnist Arthur Herman. “The first and last country to have a nuclear weapon dropped on it, Japan, doesn’t want the U.S. to adopt NFU. Neither do South Korea or most of our NATO allies, many of whom share a dangerous border with Russia. Yet breaking what works is Obama’s specialty — and liberalism’s. Reversing a six-decade-old policy would make an already uncertain and dangerous world even more uncertain and dangerous. But when has that ever stopped him before?”

More to the point: Does anyone have the courage to stop him now?