Ted C. Sorensen: The Obama-Kennedy Nuclear Policy
[Ted C. Sorensen, former Special Counsel and Adviser to President John F. Kennedy and a widely published author on the presidency and foreign affairs.]
The death of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, still unfairly blamed even in his obituaries for Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam, ironically removes from the current national dialogue on President Obama's nuclear weapons policy a champion of John F. Kennedy's original dream of a nuclear weapons-free world.
Let us "bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations," said Kennedy in his Inaugural Address in January 1961. "Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us," he told the United Nations General Assembly later that year. "...No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream -- it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race."
McNamara supported President Kennedy's decision not to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Crisis or on any other occasion; and JFK's success in ending those crises without initiating a nuclear exchange or even firing a shot convinced all of us who served with him never to rely on nuclear weapons in the future, never, as he put it, "to risk a nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth."
The old Eisenhower-Dulles policy of threatening massive retaliation, he told Congress in January 1963, reflecting upon the Cuban Missile Crisis, "may not deter piecemeal aggression; but a line of destroyers in a quarantine (like that around Cuba) or a division of well-equipped men on a border (like that around West Berlin) may be more useful to our real security than the multiplication of awesome weapons beyond all rational need."
In the single best speech of his presidency, delivered at American University's 1963 Commencement, he declared that "the acquisition of idle stockpiles which can only destroy and never create is not the most efficient means of assuring peace."
President Barack Obama made clear in his Prague speech in April of this year that he too has a "commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons... as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it." Decades earlier, Obama had specified this same goal in a college student essay. He was not talking at Prague, nor was Kennedy at American University, about unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament, but about an enforceable global nuclear pact, covering Russia as well as China, Israel as well as Iran, both India and Pakistan, and all other present and potential nuclear powers. Achievable not quickly, easily or automatically, but achievable, this pact would depend on comprehensive, invasive and effective inspections, backed by the credible threat of swift, multilateral enforcement.
The same kind of "mad bombers" critical of what they called Kennedy's "no-win policy," who believed that a nuclear exchange in which millions of American dead totaling less than tens of millions of enemy dead would be a proud victory for the United States, are still with us. Richard Perle and Senator Jon Kyl, in a June 30 Wall Street Journal article, urged the United States to keep a nuclear arsenal "for the foreseeable future." President George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to build even more powerful nuclear "bunker buster" and outer space weapons, contrary to Obama's view and Kennedy's vow. The same crowd opposes ratification of a global treaty to ban nuclear testing, which would be a crucial first step toward realizing the goal of global nuclear disarmament. Even a universal ban, these pessimists and skeptics argue, would be dangerous to U.S. national security, if some day some hostile nation sought an advantage by suddenly secretly testing and preparing for a surprise launch and treaty repudiation. But no nation, large or small, as JFK pointed out, would want to violate and thus terminate a treaty essential to the security of all; and the United States has even greater ability now to detect such tests and preparations. Nor would a potential violator fail to realize that any temporary advantage it might gain by such secret tests or preparations would clearly be far outweighed by the global sanctions, obloquy and isolation it would suffer for such illegal misconduct...
Read entire article at The Huffington Post
The death of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, still unfairly blamed even in his obituaries for Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam, ironically removes from the current national dialogue on President Obama's nuclear weapons policy a champion of John F. Kennedy's original dream of a nuclear weapons-free world.
Let us "bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations," said Kennedy in his Inaugural Address in January 1961. "Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us," he told the United Nations General Assembly later that year. "...No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream -- it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race."
McNamara supported President Kennedy's decision not to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Crisis or on any other occasion; and JFK's success in ending those crises without initiating a nuclear exchange or even firing a shot convinced all of us who served with him never to rely on nuclear weapons in the future, never, as he put it, "to risk a nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth."
The old Eisenhower-Dulles policy of threatening massive retaliation, he told Congress in January 1963, reflecting upon the Cuban Missile Crisis, "may not deter piecemeal aggression; but a line of destroyers in a quarantine (like that around Cuba) or a division of well-equipped men on a border (like that around West Berlin) may be more useful to our real security than the multiplication of awesome weapons beyond all rational need."
In the single best speech of his presidency, delivered at American University's 1963 Commencement, he declared that "the acquisition of idle stockpiles which can only destroy and never create is not the most efficient means of assuring peace."
President Barack Obama made clear in his Prague speech in April of this year that he too has a "commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons... as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it." Decades earlier, Obama had specified this same goal in a college student essay. He was not talking at Prague, nor was Kennedy at American University, about unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament, but about an enforceable global nuclear pact, covering Russia as well as China, Israel as well as Iran, both India and Pakistan, and all other present and potential nuclear powers. Achievable not quickly, easily or automatically, but achievable, this pact would depend on comprehensive, invasive and effective inspections, backed by the credible threat of swift, multilateral enforcement.
The same kind of "mad bombers" critical of what they called Kennedy's "no-win policy," who believed that a nuclear exchange in which millions of American dead totaling less than tens of millions of enemy dead would be a proud victory for the United States, are still with us. Richard Perle and Senator Jon Kyl, in a June 30 Wall Street Journal article, urged the United States to keep a nuclear arsenal "for the foreseeable future." President George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to build even more powerful nuclear "bunker buster" and outer space weapons, contrary to Obama's view and Kennedy's vow. The same crowd opposes ratification of a global treaty to ban nuclear testing, which would be a crucial first step toward realizing the goal of global nuclear disarmament. Even a universal ban, these pessimists and skeptics argue, would be dangerous to U.S. national security, if some day some hostile nation sought an advantage by suddenly secretly testing and preparing for a surprise launch and treaty repudiation. But no nation, large or small, as JFK pointed out, would want to violate and thus terminate a treaty essential to the security of all; and the United States has even greater ability now to detect such tests and preparations. Nor would a potential violator fail to realize that any temporary advantage it might gain by such secret tests or preparations would clearly be far outweighed by the global sanctions, obloquy and isolation it would suffer for such illegal misconduct...