Nuclear Weapons

President Obama's new policies on nuclear weapons definitely will make us less safe. He just virtually tossed our nuclear deterrence out the window, as he is counting on the so-called good will of our potential enemies. His new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons and is also overruling his own defense secretary's policy. This faulty strategy is a severe change and shift from those of his predecessors as he seeks to revamp our nations nuclear posture, and this comes in a time in which rogue nations and terrorist organizations like Iran and North Korea have become a greater threat than traditional powers like China and Russia.

Tea party advocates in Indiana are congratulating themselves on the Republican primary victory of one of their own, Richard Mourdock, over six-term Senate veteran Richard Lugar. But the rest of the country should be mourning the departure of the epitome of what Washington needs much more of: conscientious bipartisanship. The 80-year-old Mr. Lugar is being kicked out in part because of his age, his alleged failure to keep a real residence in Indiana, and his penchant for putting common sense and national security ahead of party labels.

WASHINGTON -- The Cold War ended more than a decade ago, yet U.S. nuclear doctrine and targeting plans still call for thousands of nuclear warheads poised to launch at a moment's notice. The Bush administration is conducting a congressionally mandated review of U.S. nuclear posture and is studying possible deployment and eventual use of low-yield nuclear weapons. The latter study would require abandoning a provision in the fiscal year 1994 defense authorization bill prohibiting nuclear laboratories from research and development that could lead to a low-yield nuclear weapon.

Alireza Jafarzadeh's recent commentary ("Iran'snuclear genie is out of the bottle," April 16) is eerily reminiscent of the manipulations of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi who shamelessly fed the US government false information with the express aim of advocating a military invasion of Iraq in 2003 in order to promote his own personal political and economic fortunes. Just as Mr. Jafarzadeh openly sides with the exiled Iranian terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq, Mr. Chalibi lived in London while leading an umbrella Iraqi opposition group (the Iraqi National Congress)

The agenda for this week's visit to Washington by Kazakhstan's President, Nursultan Nazarbayev -- as well as the one put forward earlier this month when Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk was in town -- includes a crucial national security issue.After months of trying to pin down the two leaders on the future of the nuclear weapons left behind in their countries by the former Soviet Union, the United States finally persuaded Mr. Kravchuk, and very likely will succeed in convincing Mr. Nazarbayev this Tuesday, to make three very important commitments:* To renounce nuclear weapons and to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

FROM THE nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, to our current "war," the enemy has changed from the Japanese to the Russians to Muslim terrorists, but the solution always seems to involve nuclear weapons. As long as there are terrorists and unstable or foolish leaders, there can be no safety in these weapons. As physicians, we are concerned about the health and safety of our patients, our communities and all the residents of this world. The sacrifice to public health is too great, the scale of civilian suffering and deaths too large, and the environmental contamination too long-lasting to ever justify using a nuclear weapon again.

WELL MEANING friends have counseled me that by championing elimination of nuclear weapons I risk setting the bar too high, providing an easy target for the cynical and diverting attention from the more immediately achievable.The harsh truth is that six years after the end of the Cold War we are still prisoner to its psychology of distrust, still enmeshed in the vocabulary of ''mutual assured destruction,'' still in the thrall of the nuclear era. Worse, strategists persist in conjuring worlds that spiral toward chaos, and concocting threats that they assert can only be discouraged or expunged by the existence or employment of nuclear weapons.

WASHINGTON -- Nearly a half-century after a secret atomic experiment led to the development of a mammoth government nuclear weapons industry, the Bush administration announced plans yesterday to slash the complex to four production plants in the South and Midwest and a test site in Nevada.The new configuration means that an enterprise that once produced 5,000 to 6,000 nuclear warheads a year will, by 1996, be mainly responsible for maintaining the shrinking stockpiles and cleaning up the pollution it produced, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins said.

2/3 TC LONDON -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has decided that all of its tactical nuclear weapons will be removed from Europe.Formal ratification of the decision may be announced as early as November, when the 16 NATO defense ministers are to meet in Rome, Secretary-General Manfred Woerner said yesterday in Bonn, Germany.NATO officials in Brussels, Belgium, disclosed that eliminating the battlefield nuclear arms would be part of the alliance's revised doctrine. The doctrine has been undergoing change since the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact and is being further revised because of the upheaval in the Soviet Union.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration, making a virtue of political necessity, is leaning toward a declaration that the United States would not be the first nation to resume testing of nuclear weapons, officials said yesterday.Such a move means that no new tests would be conducted in the foreseeable future by any of the world's declared nuclear powers, except perhaps China, knowledgeable officials said yesterday.While President Clinton has not announced a final decision, officials and outside experts said the ground had shifted in the administration's internal debate and a "no-first-test" policy was increasingly likely.

After a yearlong round of escalating international economic sanctions and rhetoric, the regime in Iran has finally come around to raising expectations that it will take some constructive steps in reining in its nuclear weapons ambitions. But this cycle of threat and accommodation has played out before, and its outcome should have been predictable. According to the information provided by Iranian dissidents obtained from their sources inside the regime, as well as the U.N.'s atomic watchdog agency, the nuclear genie is out of the bottle in Iran, and the regime's genius for delay and subterfuge will only give it the time to complete the dash to a workable weapon.

Not long ago, an astute reader noted that it has been nearly two years since I wrote in a column that "most experts now estimate that Iran needs about 18 months to complete a nuclear device and a missile to carry it. " His point - that those estimates were way off - was a good one, especially since experts are still estimating that Iran is 18 months away from being able to build a nuclear weapon. So what gives? Why does Iran always seem to be about 18 months away from a nuclear bomb, at least in the eyes of U.S. officials?

A neocon joke, at the beginning of the Iraq war, was: "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran. " It wasn't funny then, and it isn't funny now. Unfortunately, those "real men" who want to wage war on Iran are making so much noise that they may prevail - and hardly anyone is pushing back. Take Maryland's U.S. senators. Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin are co-sponsors of SR 380, also known as the Lieberman-Graham bill. This resolution moves the goal posts by stating that Iran must be denied the "capability" for nuclear weapons, as opposed to the weapons themselves.

The Democratic congressional candidates in Maryland's 6th District largely agree on major issues facing the country: They all favor immigration reform, more infrastructure spending to help boost the economy and a woman's right to have an abortion. But despite broadly similar positions, a few subtle differences emerged at a forum in Gaithersburg on Sunday, where several hundred voters turned out to hear the five candidates speak. They offered different answers on how to handle Iran, for instance, and what should be done to address ethical lapses in Washington.

For op-ed writer Robert O. Freedman, it's not a question of if Israel is to launch an attack on Iran, but when ("Is reelection driving Obama's Israel policy?" March 7). I am tired of the hawks' view that every Middle Eastern episode of tension can be solved by military force. True, Iran has said it would "wipe Israel off the map. " But this talk - absurd on the face of it - sounds like the posturing of a street corner punk. Iran surely knows that any attack on Israel would be suicidal because Israel could strike back with overwhelming military force, and perhaps with nuclear weapons.

While any sane person hopes that war with Iran can be avoided, The Sun's plan for averting such a conflict is misguided ("Nuclear saber-rattling," Jan. 6). The plan is unethical because it asks the U.S. to betray its own democratic ideals by recognizing the legitimacy of a fundamentalist regime ruled autocratically by clerics who systematically violate the human rights of their own citizens. The plan is dangerous because by committing the U.S. to work to create a nuclear-free Mideast, it threatens to undermineIsrael'spurely defensive nuclear weapons program, which is essential to the security it needs in a hostile region.

Ever since 9/11, the nightmare scenario for American security has been the possibility that terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons. I've just come back from the place where, in theory, that might happen: Pakistan, a country that is thought to have about 50 nuclear warheads, where al-Qaida, the Taliban and other jihadis have established a substantial foothold. The assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the continuing instability in her country force us to ask a terrifying question: Could Pakistan's Islamic extremists seize a nuke or steal the fissile material for a dirty bomb?

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Russia challenged the United States yesterday to agree to faster cuts in long-range nuclear weapons in time for the June summit between President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.After almost five hours of negotiations on the two competing arms reduction proposals, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev said they had made progress but still disagreed on several key issues.Mr. Bush and Mr. Yeltsin have both proposed large-scale cuts in their nuclear arsenals, but they differ on what missiles should be cut and how fast.

One of several casualties of the vitriolic name-calling between Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is what to do about Iran. In interviews, Mr. Romney has spoken about tougher sanctions, but it's been difficult to consider the candidates' positions on Iran -- or much else -- with the childish talk about who is the bigger liar. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, testified Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Mr. Clapper said that while American sanctions are likely to have a greater impact on Iran's nuclear program, they are not expected to lead to the demise of Iran's leadership.

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran ... Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: "If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. " The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, which The New York Times called "chillingly comprehensive" (though this is debatable), stoked this long-simmering agenda.