Obama and nuclear disarmament

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama has just "tightened the noose around Iran, North Korea," and other nuclear rogues, said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. Obama convened a session of the United Nations Security Council—a first for an American president—to show support for the U.N. and to push through a resolution "that would, if enforced, make it more difficult to turn peaceful nuclear programs into weapons projects."

Obama's "ambitious arms-control agenda" is already threatened," said Stephen Rademaker in The Wall Street Journal, for the same reasons that fellow Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had trouble. Democrats come into office with "excessive enthusiasm and ambition, which perversely encourages the Russians to overreach, dooming prospects for agreement." Republicans, on the other hand, get things done.

"Barack Obama says he wants a world without nuclear weapons," said Louis Charbonneau in Reuters, and, at the Security Council, he showed "he's serious." The resolution was passed unanimously, and it "envisages" a nuke-free world. But it's a baby step—it says nothing about "mandatory disarmament," so it's more about countries with nuclear dreams than about getting nuclear-armed nations to disarm.