How Obama talks an anti-nuke talk, walks a pro-nuke walk

President Obama makes a historic visit to Hiroshima.

(Image credit: KIMIMASA MAYAMA/AFP/Getty Images)

published 27 May 2016

This week, President Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, the first of two Japanese cities on which the United States dropped nuclear bombs at the end of World War II. While there, Obama called for a "world without nuclear weapons" and a "moral revolution."

But in practice, the president has reduced the American nuclear stockpile less than any other post-Cold War president. In fact, a new report from the Federation of American Scientists indicates that both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush shrank the stockpile significantly more than Obama and Bill Clinton — yet even Clinton destroyed nearly twice as many warheads as Obama has so far.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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