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Russia and the United States are close to deciding their nuclear weapons disarmament treaty, President Dmitry Medvedev said Sunday, ahead of talks to hammer out the new deal due to resume in February. "The negotiations are going well, we agree on 95 percent of the issues in the new deal", the Russian leader said, cited by Russian agencies from southern Krasnaya Polyana, adding he was "optimistic for the (conclusion of the) deal". Russian-US discussions over the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) took place Thursday in Moscow, according to a Russian military and diplomatic source.

The US wants to open Cold War-style arms reduction talks with China to prevent future military confrontations, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said in New Delhi on Wednesday. His comments appeared to confirm Washington's acceptance of China as a military superpower amid growing regional concerns over its build-up in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. China is currently undergoing a major overhaul of its armed forces. Beijing's increasing number of nuclear submarine deployments have caused alarm in India, which regards China as its main regional rival. China has further antagonised India by increasing military co-operation with India's rival Pakistan, which...

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama's plan to begin phasing out nuclear weapons has run up against powerful resistance from officials in the Pentagon and other US agencies, a US newspaper reported late Sunday. Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague last April. But citing unnamed officials, the newspaper said the Obama administration is now locked in internal debate over a top-secret policy blueprint for shrinking the US nuclear arsenal and reducing the role of such weapons in country's military strategy. The Pentagon has stressed the importance of continued US deterrence, an objective Obama has...

MINSK (Reuters) – The United States and Russia will sign a deal this year to cut vast Cold War arsenals of nuclear weapons but may miss an early December deadline, a Kremlin source told Reuters on Friday. Diplomats from the two biggest nuclear powers are trying to prepare a new agreement on cutting atomic weapons before the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires on December 5. The new accord will be signed "in a European country" in December, the Kremlin source told Reuters in Minsk, where President Dmitry Medvedev was meeting regional leaders. "We may not be able to do...

Disarming America by J. R. Nyquist Weekly Column Published: 10.16.2009 Print As part of the next arms reduction treaty between superpowers, the United States has tentatively agreed to unprecedented Russian access to American nuclear missile sites. According to published accounts, Russian weapons inspectors will be given an open door to American nuclear sites in order to monitor the number of missiles and warheads. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is quite satisfied with the deal. Perhaps it is an error of omission, but there is no news of a similar concession from the Russian side. This is psychologically and strategically significant:...

Threatening Iran with more sanctions would be counterproductive, Russia's foreign minister declared Tuesday, resisting efforts by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to win agreement for tougher measures if Iran fails to prove its nuclear program is peaceful. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke as Clinton visited Moscow, her first trip since becoming America's top diplomat

In the midst of one of the greatest existential threats of our times, President Obama is pursuing severe reductions in US military strength.  His recent statements at the United Nations have merely added fuel to the fire. When combined with his pledge to reduce US nuclear weapons stockpiles by 80 percent, a clear pattern emerges. These actions would seem irrational, even by Obama's standards, if they weren't in keeping with a 50-year old strategy aimed at unilaterally disarming the United States in order that a "progressively strengthened" UN Peace Force might be established. This idea has been steadily advanced during...

During his appearance at the United Nations, Barack Obama envisioned a world without nuclear weapons. We think we found this imaginary world and where it came from, as shown in the animation (http://www.stentorian.com/cartoons/2008/obama_movie.gif, Barack Obama's Amazing Acid Trip to a World Without Nuclear Weapons). Meanwhile, with due credit to Jefferson Airplane for the original, The red pill makes you larger And the blue pill makes you small And the pain pill that Barry will give you Won’t do anything at all Go ask Barry When he’s ten feet tall And if you want nuclear disarmament And you know anything at...

President Obama's dream of a world without nuclear weapons seems more like a nightmare to Russia and other nations that possess doomsday arms. Obama is pushing on a door that is closed, barred from inside and locked with a key that has been thrown away as far as the Kremlin is concerned. This harsh reality does not mean that the president should abandon his effort, which is a useful tool in his broader, more urgent campaign to change America's image abroad. It does mean that Obama should temper his rhetoric and avoid adding atomic abolition to the growing list of...

The right is calling Obama weak, but his wily foreign policy is paying off The spluttering of the American right — and some European conservatives — over Barack Obama’s foreign policy reached a new level of vituperation last week. “Is Obama naive?” pondered Michael Ledeen at National Review. “I don’t think so. I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America.” Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “[Obama’s] appeasement of Iran, his bullying of Israel, his surrender to Moscow, his call for a nuclear-free world ... have all won him plaudits in the large...

When it comes to the nuclear-weapons issue, President Obama wants to be a global community organizer. However, what we really need are some tough beat cops with a mandate to clean up the neighborhood. On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution drafted by the United States that calls upon, urges, encourages, but does not require U.N. member states to take various actions to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama chaired the meeting and pressed the vision of a nuclear-weapons-free world that he had introduced in April. In the practical world of counterproliferation, the president...

President Obama appreciates "teachable moments," so let's all discuss this week's lesson in arms control theory and practice. The President brought his soaring sermon about "a world without [nuclear] weapons" before the U.N. General Assembly. He called for a new arms control treaty and won Security Council support for a vague resolution on proliferation. On cue yesterday, Iran showed the world what determined rogues think about such treaties. On the evidence of his Presidency so far, Mr. Obama will not let that reality interfere with his disarmament dreams. The disclosure that Iran has a second facility to make bomb-grade fuel,...

Defense Spending: The TARP bailout may hit $24 trillion, but the Senate says the F-22 is too expensive to build and maintain. So why are the Japanese so desperate to buy this "unnecessary" Cold War weapon?By a vote of 58-40, the Senate on Tuesday voted to remove $1.75 billion set aside in a defense bill to build seven more F-22 Raptors, adding to the 187 stealth technology fighters already in the pipeline. After some hope the production lines would be kept open, the Senate succumbed to arguments by the administration and others that the fighter was too expensive, too hard...

Defense: By a narrow margin, a House subcommittee has voted to keep open the F-22 Raptor production line. The future of American air dominance and the fate of the world's most capable fighter hang in the balance.On May 30, with North Korea huffing and puffing about nuclear war, the first of 12 high-tech U.S. F-22 Raptor fighter jets landed at Kadena Air Base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa. It was just days after North Korea unnerved the region by detonating a nuclear device. There were reasons the F-22 was deployed to Japan. The stealthy, radar-evading fighter jet is...

Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the planned missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland, the...

Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country. Those nine words define the Obama doctrine with respect to American security policy. All three elements were much in evidence in the president's benighted decision last week to cancel the "third site" for intercontinental-range missile defenses in Eastern Europe. They will be on display as well during this week's several conclaves with foreign leaders. The cumulative effect is predictable: A world in which the United States has fewer friends, more enemies and fewer options for assuring its security. Let's start with the decision to abandon defense of our allies and the...

Then there is the catalogue of Mr. Obama's embarrassing moments on the world stage, a list which includes: giving England's Queen Elizabeth II an iPod with his speeches on it; giving British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a collection of DVDs that were not formatted to the European standard (by contrast, Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama an ornamental desk-pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet, among other historically significant gifts); calling "Austrian" a language; bowing to the Saudi king; releasing a photo of a conference call with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the president...

Tomorrow, President Obama will chair a special nuclear-disarmament meeting by the United Nations Security Council. The White House bills this as a historic first, but it is typical of Mr. Obama's emphasis on style over substance. He will appear before the body with the weakest foreign-policy record of any new U.S. president in recent memory. An around-the-world tour of international hot spots shows that for all the president's lofty rhetoric, he can point to precious few accomplishments. In the Middle East, Mr. Obama's unprecedented obsequiousness in dealing with the Muslim world has generated no tangible returns. The leading Arab states...

It's good news that President Obama has kicked back the Pentagon's "timid" proposals for a new nuclear posture review in favour of a radical rewrite (Barack Obama ready to slash US nuclear arsenal, 21 September). Breaking out of the "more of the same" approach is key to making progress towards abolition. It was disappointing, then, to read David Miliband's comments, pushing attention off on to Iran and North Korea, as usual (New nuclear resolve, 21 September). Perhaps this isn't surprising when you consider that the UK's nuclear policy remains the replacement of Trident – a cold war system with no...

To ensure everyone likes the USA, President Obama’s approach is to set an example – for Russia, Iran, North Korea and other nuclear states – by cutting our own nuke arsenal and denying missile defense systems for Poland and the Czech Republic. There will be no peace without strength.

Obama promised to neuter America before the election in one of his campaign ads to supporters: That was one promise he decided to keep. As promised, Barack Obama will go ahead with his plan to weaken America's stand in the world. The Guardian reported today that Obama is pushing a radical plan to eliminate not hundreds but thousands of the nation's strategic warheads, via Free Republic. Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal. Obama has rejected the...

The U.S. shift on missile defense is part of a broader White House strategy to signal its commitment to disarmament and moving toward eventually eliminating America's nuclear-weapons stockpile. The strategy includes developing and enforcing treaties aimed at banning atomic-weapons testing and the production of weapons-grade nuclear fuel. "There's more happening this year on the disarmament front than what's occurred over the past decade," said a senior U.S. official working on nonproliferation issues. The crucial first step, said U.S. officials, is the successful completion of a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia by year's end. The treaty aims to reduce...

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal. Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Strategic Defense: With Iran on the verge of a deliverable nuke, the administration tells our allies in the dead of night that we will scuttle missile defense plans in Eastern Europe to please the Russians.Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after...

Alliances: The U.S. has expressed a willingness to barter away missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Now the Polish foreign minister says he hopes his country doesn't regret trusting the United States.The Brussels Forum is a privately organized high-level meeting of the most influential North American and European political, corporate and intellectual leaders to address pressing challenges currently facing both sides of the Atlantic. One of the pressing issues discussed at this year's conference was whether the U.S. is serious about bartering away plans for missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for...

MANY COMMENTATORS HAVE WONDERED WHAT CONCESSIONS BARACK OBAMA WRUNG out of the Russian leadership in exchange for canceling a major missile defense initiative in Eastern Europe this week. Some have speculated he attained, or at least sought, cooperation in stifling Iran’s nuclear program. Unfortunately, it appears the president sold out two close allies, rewarded Moscow’s belligerence, and sidetracked technology that could safeguard the free world from Islamic nuclear blackmail in order to curtail, not Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but our own. Obama, a passionate believer in universal disarmament, may have made this concession to draw Russia into negotiations that will further...

Sweetness and Light is forbidden, where they have the complete text of the letter, so, here's a repost from 2006. Text of KGB Letter on Senator Ted Kennedy Special Importance Committee on State Security of the USSR 14.05.1983 No. 1029 Ch/OV Moscow Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Comrade Y.V. Andropov Comrade Y.V. Andropov On 9-10 May of this year, Senator Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant J. Tunney was in Moscow. The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of...

New York - US President Barack Obama is scheduled to preside over a United Nations Security Council session next month on nuclear disarmament - the first such event by the body that was formed to maintain peace and security around the world, UN officials said Wednesday. The meeting on September 24 at UN headquarters in New York would be attended by some, if not all, of the heads of state of the council's 15 members. As the United States holds the rotating presidency of the council in September, the US president gets to chair the nuclear debate. Obama will be...

Defense: President Obama dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Unless testing and maintenance of our nuclear deterrent is resumed, it will be a world without American nuclear weapons.In his Prague speech this spring, the president spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," ignoring the fact that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure. We recently observed the anniversaries of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actions that brought an abrupt end to the carnage of World War II and arguably...

Voters want Britain to scrap nuclear weapons altogether rather than replace Trident, according to a new Guardian/ICM poll today. The result marks a sharp turnaround in public opinion amid growing debate about the cost of a new generation of nuclear weapons and the impact of conventional defence cutbacks on the war in Afghanistan. For decades nuclear disarmament has been seen as a minority issue, with most voters assumed to favour continued investment in an independent British nuclear weapons system. But today's poll shows that 54% of all voters would prefer to abandon nuclear weapons rather than put money into a...

The signing ceremony in Moscow was a grand affair. For Barack Obama, foreign policy neophyte and “reset” man, the arms reduction agreement had a Kissingerian air. A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage. Unfortunately for the United States, the country Obama represents, the prospective treaty is useless at best, detrimental at worst. Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia “Joint Understanding,” is an irrelevance. We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into...

The former defense secretary on the U.S. deterrent and the terrorist threat. 'Nuclear weapons are used every day." So says former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, speaking last month at his office in a wooded enclave of Maclean, Va. It's a serene setting for Doomsday talk, and Mr. Schlesinger's matter-of-fact tone belies the enormity of the concepts he's explaining -- concepts that were seemingly ignored in this week's Moscow summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. We use nuclear weapons every day, Mr. Schlesinger goes on to explain, "to deter our potential foes and provide reassurance to the allies to...

The Pope has called for the world economy to be restructured in line with the principles of "love, truth and charity" in a new encyclical issued today. He urges the reformation of the United Nations and economic institutions to address the global economic crisis, which he links to relativism, globalisation and the abuse of modern technologies. The encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, interpreted variously throughout the document as charity or love in truth, is Pope Benedict XVI's third but his first on social issues. It is timed to coincide with the G8 in Italy and is intended to bring objective moral...

I don’t play poker, but I think I get the idea. I think the idea is to win. I think the idea is to have better cards than your opponents and to play your cards better than your opponents. It’s part luck and it’s part smarts. But the idea, again, is to win. For example, let’s say you’re playing a five-card game, nothing showing. You’re dealt the cards, you pick them up, you fan them out. You see an ace, another ace, a king, an ace and another ace. Four aces and a king.Like I said, I don’t play poker,...

Obama, Medvedev Call for Cut to 1,500-1,675 Nuclear Warheads Title only - story to follow

From "45 Communist Goals": Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963:1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength. 'Goals' 4-45 can be found here or at many other sites through a web search for "45 goals":http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm ____________________________________________________________ From Obama's recent speech in Cairo: "No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons. That is why I strongly reaffirmed America’s commitment to seek a world in...

AMSTERDAM, June 20 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday he hopes his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in July in Moscow will promote a new nuclear disarmament treaty. "We are ready to cut our strategic delivery vehicles by several times compared to the START-1 treaty. As for warheads connected with these delivery vehicles, their number should be lower than the level envisioned by the Moscow Treaty of 2002," Medvedev told journalists. "We are for real, effective and checkable cuts," he said, adding that at the meeting with Obama they will also discuss economic and regional problems,...

Perhaps no part of the Obama administration’s planned Defense Department budget makes less sense than its effort to slash $1.2B from missile defense programs for FY 2010. In light of the recent behavior of North Korea and the reminder that we face the prospect of a nuclear-armed revolutionary Islamic state in Iran, a group of Republican congressmen on the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday offered a series of amendments seeking to reverse the proposed cuts.

Obama's new budget plan includes a little-noted sea change in U.S. nuclear policy, and a step towards his vision of a denuclearized world. It provides no funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, created to design a new generation of long-lasting nuclear weapons that don't need to be tested. (The military is worried that a nuclear test moratorium in effect since 1992 might endanger the reliability of an aging US arsenal.) But this spring Obama issued a bold call for a world free of nuclear weapons, and part of that vision entails leading by example. That means halting programs that...

Suddenly, arms control is back. "Our leadership in the area of arms control and nonproliferation is of such profound global concern that that is at the top of the list" in U.S.-Russian relations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said after meeting yesterday with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In New York, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators sat down to start work on renewing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the 1991 pact that cut in half the superpowers' stockpiles of nuclear warheads. The talks are the first step in the administration's effort to seek "a world without nuclear weapons," as President...

...a gaggle of Johnnys - notably former Clinton Defense Secretary William J. Perry and other worthies who should know better - are telling the American people that it is safe and responsible to do the national equivalent of jumping off a bridge. They contend that the United States can prudently get rid of most of our nuclear arsenal, en route to what they say is a desirable end-state: a "nuclear-free" world. For a sense of how surreal this recommendation is, consider the prospect that Pakistan's virulent Taliban may be within weeks of joining the nuclear "club" by taking over the...

Young evangelical leaders on Tuesday announced a national initiative to enlist Christians online and in schools and churches to make a moral case for nuclear disarmament. "I know when most people think of the elimination of nuclear weapons, they think of tie-dyed activists," said Tyler Wigg Stevenson, a 31-year-old Baptist pastor.

Famed detective Sherlock Holmes once solved a case based on the fact that a dog didn’t bark. In our time, nuclear weapons are the equivalent of that silent pooch. At a recent speech in Prague, President Barack Obama declared that, “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act,” to eliminate nuclear weapons. “We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it,” he added. But this view ignores decades of military history, and fails to give the U.S. the credit it deserves. Never before in history...

In his major foreign policy address in Prague committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama took note of North Korea's missile launch just hours earlier and then grandiloquently proclaimed: "Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response." A more fatuous presidential call to arms is hard to conceive. What "strong international response" did Mr. Obama muster to North Korea's brazen defiance of a Chapter 7 -- "binding," as it...

PARIS (AFP)--France said Friday it had begun to reduce its own arsenal long before U.S. President Barack Obama called for a "world without nuclear weapons," as a leaked memo showed Paris unimpressed by his speech. ....Sarkozy's foreign policy advisers were dismissive of Obama's call for an end to the arms race, which he made to a cheering crowd of supporters in Prague on Sunday. France also poured cold water on the idea that disarmament measures by declared nuclear powers would aid nonproliferation work by persuading rogue states and terrorist groups to drop their own weapons programs.

TOKYO (AFP) — US Senator John McCain Friday backed a call by President Barack Obama, his former rival for the White House, for a planet free of nuclear weapons and this should start with North Korea and Iran. The Republican senator from Arizona was speaking in Japan on the last leg of an Asia tour, after Tokyo was angered by Pyongyang firing a rocket over its territory Sunday. "Concerning President Obama's commitment to the removal of nuclear weapons from the Earth, I certainly support that ambitious goal," McCain told a Tokyo press conference.

It is no fun to be the one who rains on the parade, and, if nothing else, President Obama's trip to Europe has been quite a parade....Still, someone has to say it: Although some things went well on this trip, some things went badly. The centerpiece of the visit, Obama's keynote foreign policy speech in Prague...was, to put it bluntly, peculiar. He used it to call for "a world without nuclear weapons" and a new series of arms control negotiations with Russia. This was not wrong, necessarily, and not evil. But it was strange. Clearly, the "no nukes" policy is...

President Barack Obama, in the face of a rocket launch this weekend by North Korea, announced an ambitious U.S. arms-control campaign aimed at drastically reducing atomic weapons globally while still recognizing developing nations' rights to pursue nuclear power. Mr. Obama's strategy, unveiled Sunday in a speech to a Czech crowd of 20,000, commits the U.S. to take the lead in reducing its nuclear-weapons stockpile in a bid to gain Russian and Chinese support for curbing the mounting proliferation threats posed by North Korea and Iran. The president said he would convene an international summit in Washington aimed at shrinking the...

PRAGUE – Just hours after North Korea launched a long-range rocket, President Barack Obama called for "a world without nuclear weapons" and said the United States has a “moral responsibility ” to lead the way, as the only nation ever to use them. ----------------------------------------------------------- Speaking to Iran, the other nation widely thought to be pursuing nuclear weapons, Obama reiterated his campaign pledge to engage the Tehran regime, winning applause for saying, “We believe in dialogue.”

<p>PRAGUE (AP) — President Barack Obama is calling for the United States to make a new effort to ratify the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.</p> <p>Speaking in Prague, Obama said ratification of the treaty that the Senate rejected a decade ago is one of the "concrete steps" the U.S. can take to reach his goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.</p>