[jazusamo]

Exactly, I can’t see anything good coming from this. Don’t know if O and his team is just naive or if they know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. I doubt there’s any former recent president that would have done this, maybe Carter.

[Brad from Tennessee]

I think the White House is so desperate to legitimize its foreign policy that it will risk national security for the temporary illusion of progress. As North pointed out, the administration is totally spinning the talks. Medvedev observed: “The joint understanding, which has just been signed, declares the link between offensive and defensive armaments. . .” Obama claimed there was no linkage. The Russians want a new Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty because they can't compete in an SDI arena. If the U.S. and NATO are willing to spend the money on ABM’s they can come close to neutralizing Russia's strategic nuclear force. Reagan's rearmament of Western Europe and his mostly smoke-and-mirrors “Star Wars” threat frightened and demoralized Gorbachev—for a change—into an epiphany.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal is well-maintained but the bulk of the warheads is aging. The tooling no longer exists to re-fabricate many of the original components. A long debate has been going on over the reliability of rehabilitated warheads. Because these will contain “aftermarket” components there is a chance they could malfunction. There are computer models for testing these weapons but some of the engineers and physicists are convinced that only an actual test will answer the question. This requires violating the Test Ban Treaty. There is also a design for the next generation of warheads—costing a few hundred billion to develop and produce. One or two of these would have to be tested.

Obama doesn't want to even deal with this because it boggles his mind. Instead he wants a “Nuclear Free World.” He might as well wish for a newspaper containing only good news.