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| President Barack Obama at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate |
Today, in front of the historic Brandenburg Gate, US President
Barack Obama stood where Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy before him also
stood. He uttered the words now made
famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” to a cheering crowd waving German and American
flags together. President Obama
addressed the issue of nuclear weapons and proliferation in his speech. Perhaps more importantly, Obama said, “We may
no longer live in fear of global annihilation, but so long as nuclear weapons
exist, we are not truly safe.” While
most likely rhetoric, Mr. Obama was correct when he said this; for as long as
weapons exist that can take out entire cities and regions, no country or people
are safe if war breaks out.
President Obama championed the New START Treaty in his speech
saying, “I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War
nuclear postures.” However, unless Mr.
Obama has had some great change of heart, his actions during his Presidency
regarding nuclear weapons have yet to meet the expectations laid out in his
grandiose speeches. The New START Treaty
is made to sound ambitious and groundbreaking, it is however very conservative
in its changes and unimaginative. The
new treaty sets the deployed weapon limit at 1550 warheads for each
country. The estimate of the US
stockpile is estimated at 4,650 warheads, of which around 2,150 are deployed. Russian nuclear stockpile is estimated at
4,500 weapons. Only 1,800 of those
warheads are deployed. So the limit of
1550 really isn’t that drastic of a change.
