Free Republic

Earlier this year Barack Obama raised eyebrows among supporters when he proposed a double-digit increase in the US nuclear weapons budget. The move, accompanied by a proposed freeze in all US domestic non-defence spending, was seen as flying “in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize”, in the phrase of one excitable British tabloid. In fact the boost, which would refurbish US nuclear weapons laboratories after years of cuts, was Nobel-esque in its underlying aims. Subsequent events – including the signing in Prague on Thursday by the US president and Dmitry Medvedev, his Russian counterpart, of a fresh treaty to...