A Step Forward, Excuse Me, for Obama

Signing the START 2 Treaty proves that the president, in the midst of his greatest difficulties, is able to make progress.

Let’s NOT try to provoke angry critics of the extreme right. Rather, let’s return to reality. For two months, Barack Obama has suffered a tough electoral warning. The results from Nov. 2 demolished a good part of his program. However, one part still remains, and perhaps it will be here to stay — maybe for a while. If we consider just two of Obama’s greatest advances, the health care reform and his nuclear arms reduction treaty, then his election in November 2008, by far, was worth every bit of it. America is how it is. It is full of opinions and is part aggressively conservative. But just a part of it is: We will see what happens in the November 2012 elections. Nothing, nor much less than that, has been decided upon. The nuclear arms treaty was approved in the Senate, by a vote of 71 to 26.

In the new treaty between Russia and the United States, Obama and Putin-Medvedev have taken it another step. In figures, it is a modest advance: But the process to denuclearize is continuous, whether or not the American administration is Republican or Democrat, and whether or not they were ex-Soviets in Russia. Two permanent cycles have been at work since the time of Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush. In those 20 years, [the number of] weapons of the two most powerful states in nuclear armament has decreased from the United States’ 10,563 and Russia’s 10,271 to its current maximum of 1,550 atomic warheads per country. Russians and Americans can deploy a maximum of 700 launch systems: submarines, bombers, launch pads. And even more important, since December 2010, the date when START I expired, START II establishes a new system of inspections.

Let’s leave the costs aside: Just to modernize the maintenance systems, President Obama could commit to $8.5 million each year in the next 10 years on just this one issue (Spain’s military budget comes to a total of $13 million per year). It has been said that nuclear force was the only way in which Russian leaders could talk one-to-one with their similarly minded Americans. This is not just any kind of merchandise: We’re not talking here about the cotton industry in Alabama or of Russian samovar exportation to Paris. Speaking of Paris: What will future French leaders do if the United States, China, Russia or India unleash a sharp demand against atomic weapons? It is easy to defend force de frappe, but it is impossible, or almost impossible, to resist the threat of four great powers on the technological, financial and commercial forefronts.

Wouldn’t the confrontations born around 1950 seem impractical if those four powers forced the elimination of arsenals, current or future, from Israel, Pakistan or Iran?

Nuclear deterrence has weighed upon peoples’ consciousness like a brutal coercion, in which technological refinement has mixed with the worst savagery. That raised torch has left people out of breath, leaving them unable to think. Hiroshima’s shadow was there. A world without nuclear weapons is difficult: American superiority with conventional weapons is so overwhelming that it acts as a brake. But crisis serves to open doors that have knocked down gigantic walls: universal health care, common currency, an AIDS vaccine … achievable hopes. Some have knocked down the walls more than others. And Barack Obama has knocked them down — he sure has.