Ted Bromund: Obama needs to refocus his vision over nuclear weapons

The focus is on the United States. And, even stranger, it's the

President of the United States who put it there by signing a new arms treaty with Russia. The spotlight will only brighten this week when Obama hosts his nuclear security summit in Washington.

The Iranians won't attend, of course. That's understandable: the more the world worries about the US's arsenal, the less time it will have for Iran. And that suits Iran just fine.

In the big picture, the focus on America makes no sense. Since the mid-1960s, the US nuclear arsenal has shrunk by 90 per cent, from more than 30,000 to under 3,000. The US has an outstanding command and control system, and a military entirely subordinate to civilian authority. The world would not be one tiny bit safer if the US had 1,500 bombs in its arsenal instead of 2,200.

The President's justification for his nuclear agenda is that, as he put it in 2009: "It's nave for us to think... that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we're going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves."

Of course, the size of America.'s nuclear stockpile has not been growing. It has been shrinking for more than 40 years. But the President's belief that the US will only be able to convince Iran to disarm by doing so itself is a far more serious delusion.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time the West has succumbed to the liberal fallacy that liberals are the centre of the universe, and that evil states will follow a good example if only liberals set it.

In 1934, Winston Churchill condemned those who said that "we should run the risk of disarming ourselves in order to set an example to others. We have done that already... But our example has not been followed. On the contrary, it has produced the opposite result. All the other countries have armed only the more heavily; and the quarrels and intrigues about disarmament have only bred more ill-will between nations."

As Churchill implied, the least that should be asked of arms control is that it do no harm. And unfortunately, Obama's arms control efforts have already done a good deal of harm.

The President has established a clear, announced linkage between the size of the US arsenal and the Iranian and North Korean programmes. These programmes are not only illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they are a direct threat to the security of the US and its allies.

But from now on, every time this President or a later one urges Iran to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons, the regime will throw Obama's words back in his face, saying that Iran

only pursues nuclear weapons because the US already has them.

The President thinks he is advancing the cause of global nuclear disarmament. Instead, he is creating a built-in excuse for the misdeeds of every dictatorship, and piling up pressure on the US to cut even more.

Even in the context of US-Russian relations, the new treaty is a dangerous irrelevancy. Obama has played into Russia's hands: the treaty feeds Russia's expectations that it can maintain a peer relationship with the US by relying on nuclear weapons. That is not disarmament. In fact, it's dangerous: the more Russia relies on offensive nuclear weapons, instead of economic and political reforms, to maintain its place in the world, the more likely it is, one day, to use its weapons.

But that is not part of Obama's nuclear vision. His recently-released revision of America's nuclear strategy focuses entirely on the circumstances under which the US might, or might not, use nuclear weapons.

His administration has entirely forgotten that the US arsenal exists not simply to be used. It exists to deter use by others. And, contrary to the White House's claims, the US-Russia treaty directly limits the ability of the US to deploy an effective missile defence system that would provide a shield against Iran's growing missile programme.

The administration talks about a nuclear free world, but its policies will increase Iran's ability to pursue its nuclear programme, increase the Russian reliance on nuclear weapons, increase the US's reliance on a morally and strategically dubious strategy of retaliation, and reduce the US's ability to protect itself.

It's easy to clap when a nuclear arms control treaty is announced. But as Churchill knew, good intentions are no substitute for good policies.

Ted R Bromund is a Senior Research Fellow at The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, Washington.