President Obama yesterday signed the U.S. instrument of ratification for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia yet did not release the text of the document to the public. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to exchange this instrument with the Russian government’s corresponding instrument this weekend in Germany, which is the last step required for bringing the treaty into force. The Senate should be suspicious for two reasons. First, it should be suspicious about the White House’s failure to make public the text of the …
Yesterday in Tehran’s Azadi Square, hundreds of thousands of Iranians turned out to listen to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech marking the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad did not disappoint the adoring crowd, defiantly announcing that Iran had become a “nuclear state,” adding: “The Iranian nation is brave enough that if one day we wanted to create an atomic bomb, we would announce it publicly and would create it.” But the Iranian nation is not nearly as unified behind the current regime as yesterday’s production was meant to show. …
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today used the annual celebration of the anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution to announce that Iran has become a “nuclear state.” Although the bombastic dictator has made this claim before, his exultant announcement came shortly after Iran had announced that it would enrich uranium to the 20 percent level that it claims it needs to fuel a research reactor that is scheduled to run out of fuel later this year. Ahmadinejad proclaimed: “I want to announce with a loud voice here that the first package of …
Given Iran’s well established pattern of behavior (and Russia’s, and China’s) we were highly skeptical about President Barack Obama’s “Reset Button” approach to U.S. diplomacy. And now it seems that the failure of Obama administration’s Iranian engagement strategy is about to shift the focus of U.S. diplomacy from “reset” to “panic.” Reuters reports: The United States wants the U.N. Security Council to approve a resolution within weeks, not months, laying the ground for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert …
Iran’s government announced that it was pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium to 20 percent levels, ostensibly to fuel a research reactor. The latest Iranian zig zag came only days after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that Iran was open to a deal on exchanging some of its stockpile of low enriched uranium for fuel for a research reactor that the United Nations offered last year. Ahmadinejad suggested that he had made the decision to escalate Iran’s enrichment efforts because western powers failed to accept Iran’s counter-offer: “We gave them …
During his State of the Union Speech President Obama underscored his goal of “getting to zero” nuclear weapons by citing Ronald Reagan’s aspirations for a world without nuclear weapons: I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them. With all due respect, this statement was misleading and disingenuous. Ronald Reagan’s long-term vision of a world without nuclear weapons presupposed a robust missile defense—the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—that would render offensive nuclear …
Iran’s Green Movement opposition has proven to be a stronger and more persistent political force than many advocates of diplomatic engagement with Iran’s dictatorship had expected. This development, as well as the regime’s continued duplicity and foot-dragging on the nuclear issue, has led some to revise their thinking about supporting regime change in Iran. For example, Richard Haass, a self-professed “card-carrying realist” who formerly opposed the Bush Administration’s support for regime change, now has changed his mind. He has written an essay in the current issue of Newsweek that assesses …
The Pentagon’s top intelligence official this week indicated that although Iran has been developing the means to build nuclear weapons, his agency has discerned no sign that Tehran has made a final decision to do so. Lt. General Ronald Burgess, the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Voice of America in an interview that “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.” Given Iran’s long …
According to a January 4 report in the Los Angeles Times, President Obama’s plan for nuclear disarmament is meeting opposition from the Department of Defense. Specifically, the Department of Defense believes that President Obama’s plan jeopardizes U.S. security. They are right. First and foremost, the American people need to understand that U.S. nuclear forces and the infrastructure to support them have been atrophying since the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear forces and Iran and North Korea are looking to become de facto …
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he plans for Russia to respond to the fielding of missile defense systems by the United States by modernizing Russia’s nuclear force in order to overcome the defense. This is not surprising because Russian officials have been stating for some time that they plan to seek offensive nuclear capabilities to counter U.S. non-nuclear defenses and have been actively pursuing a nuclear modernization program. The Russian offensive nuclear response to the U.S. non-nuclear defensive program is grounded in Prime Minister Putin’s …
