Obama's Nuclear-Zero Delusion Endangers Israel

Louis René Beres

Security, Middle East

Israel can't survive in a world free of nuclear weapons.

From the very start of his presidency, Barack Obama has expressed clear preference for “a world free of nuclear weapons.” In principle, of course, this openly revealed hope for eventual nuclear disarmament may initially have sounded altogether admirable and benign. In fact, however, it was never remotely plausible, and it was also never desirable. Indeed, if nuclear disarmament had actually been taken seriously as tangible policy (thankfully, it wasn’t), this delusionary sentiment could have led the United States and certain allies to sometime incur very substantial or even incalculable military harms.

Now, however, it is time to look forward, not backward. Today, in geostrategic terms, and at the incontestable twilight of Obama’s presidency, it is far more important for all Americans to inquire about the nuclear policy sentiments of his likely successor, whether Democrat or Republican. For example, we will need to ask: “Will our next president share Obama’s more-or-less visceral correlation of nuclear military force with evil in world politics?”

Any such correlation seems to have been rooted in the president’s unhidden presumption that nuclear weapons, precisely because of their conspicuously unique power of destructiveness, are more than “merely” dangerous. In this starkly confused view, such weapons are taken to be inherently bad. Here, at least in terms of formal logic, the conclusion doesn’t follow at all from the premises. This conclusion is very plainly fallacious.

But it’s not just a question of errors in logical reasoning. History, too, should instruct our next president that atomic arms are assuredly not per se destabilizing. In many volatile and otherwise still-perilous circumstances, he or she will need to understand, nuclear weapons can even prove to be distinctly peace-enhancing.

This conclusion was most evidently recognizable during and after the Cold War, when two superpowers—Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer had then called them “two scorpions in a bottle”—successfully avoided uncontrolled escalations to World War III. Arguably, it should now be borne in mind, without a stabilizing nuclear “balance of terror,” such a conflagration could have been much more likely.