Obama Wants to Restrain Usage of Nuclear Weapons

The American president is going to restrain the conditions in which the United States would be allowed to use nuclear weapons, an American senior official anonymously revealed on Monday. The United States’ new nuclear strategy, which must be revealed in detail on Tuesday, aims to “reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons in U.S. national-security policy as well as pursue the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons,” indicated this senior official. It is the first time that the American nuclear strategy has the prevention of nuclear terrorism and proliferation as its first goal.

The president will ensure that the United States will never use nuclear weapons against an adversary who does not have a nuclear arsenal and who respects the rules of the non-proliferation agreement, confirmed the New York Times on its website, after having interviewed president Obama. However, he does specify that “countries such as Iran and North Korea” would be exceptions to this new rule, according to a rare direct statement made at the time.

According to the administration’s senior official, this revision of the country’s nuclear strategy — only the third of its kind since the end of the Cold War — is part of the president’s larger plan to best assure the country’s safety. The announcement, which must be made Tuesday, will mark the kick-off of an intense ten days of nuclear diplomacy, with signatures on Thursday in Prague by President Obama and Russian president Dmitri Medvedev on a new treaty, Start (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), to reduce nuclear weaponry with Russia. The announcement is also conveniently made a week prior to the Washington summit, to which President Obama invited forty world leaders to discuss security and non-proliferation on the 12th and 13th of April.