Posted on 05/03/2010 7:11:11 PM PDT by lbryce
This is the first time the Pentagon has officially disclosed the number after previously regarding the information as top secret.
A senior defence official said the size of the stockpile represents a 75% reduction since 1989.
"Increasing the transparency of global nuclear stockpiles is important to non proliferation efforts," said a statement from the Pentagon.
The US government last disclosed details of the stockpile in 1993, releasing figures current up to 1961.
The total does not include warheads that have been retired and scheduled for dismantlement - an estimated 4,600 according to the Federation of American Scientists group.
The release coincides with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's address to the United Nations nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference.
It is checking up on efforts to contain the spread of nuclear weapons around the world.
Mrs Clinton accused Iran of "flouting the rules" and called for a strong international response to Tehran's alleged development of a nuclear weapons program.
She added that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would fail in his bid to wreck the NPT review conference, currently taking place in New York.
"It appears that Iran's president came here today with no intention of improving the NPT," Clinton told a press conference after her speech to delegates to the conference.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
Transparency is great for window shoppers, store displays, ocean views and decidely not for matters of national defense such as number of warheads within our nuclear arsenal. What's the point? This could very well be revealed in disarmament talks privy only to those negotiating nations without the need to turning it into some PSA.
But, assuredly as this new policy emanates from the Oracle of "O", the globe's greatest peacemaker as anointed by a committee in Norway I guess it's okay.
Transparency of school records, health records and birth certificates is helpful to re-election efforts.
I suppose next will be a dot gov website where our submarines’ locations are clearly marked. /s
Next up on Bambi’s agenda will be free tours of Groom Lake!
What’s Barry’s real name. The ultimate undocumented worker.
Already posted under breaking news
Barak Obama’s idea of transparency is akin to being followed by a guy with a gun at night. In your efforts to deal “strategically” with him, you take a flashlight, hold it at arms length and shine it directly into your face, shielding your eyes with your gun hand, then call out to the guy.
excellent
I’m sure Obama’s given away all our secrets privately already, so this public disclosure doesn’t mean much.
There is coming a time when Russia will attack us. And our government won’t even respond.
Any suggestions??
As I just expressed in the previous comment, after this article failed to appear in the FR search results as having already been submitted, I felt quite confident in posting the article as it appears. Please kindly let me know if there might be some other approach you know of to prevent this from happening again. Thank you.
Impeach now.
Obama would never drop nukes on another country. On Arizona or Texas, perhaps, but not on another country.
Be careful of what you ask for, you may get it.
PS, can you say treason?
As is my absolute protocol before posting any articles on FR, I always submit the article to a FR search to avoid just such incidents as you've kindly pointed out. "US Says It Has Over 5,000 Nuclear Warheads", I just re-submitted the title and to prove my point only this very article turned up. I apologize fo the double posting but other than using the search option I have no way of knowing an article on the same subject had only recently been submitted.
First of all, in your search use only a few keywords from the article title, but fairly unique ones that most likely won't be duplicated too much in other articles...
You could have used just "nuclear warheads" for example ... and if you click on that you can see what you come up with. And that's not too many articles to quickly examine to see if yours is exactly the same as someone elses. You'll see that yours is the only one from SkyNews.
SO..., you don't have to avoid the "same subject" being duplicated -- but rather -- the exact same article and source being duplicated -- that's the duplication you're supposed to avoid.
If it's the same subject (the exact same subject), but it's a different source (and the title will likely be slightly different too) -- that's okay to post it. That's not a duplicate, according to the Free Republic rules.
It's the "exact same article" that you're supposed to avoid duplicating here ... :-)
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