Obama’s no Reagan on nuclear issues
One of the memes the left is currently employing in response to criticism of Obama’s nuclear policies is some variation on the theme: “But Reagan wanted a nuclear-free world too.”
Sure he did. Doesn’t everybody? But just because the two men wanted the same distant (and probably unobtainable) goal doesn’t not equate them, as James Carafano points out today in the Washington Examiner:
Like Reagan, Obama believes America must lead the way to nuclear disarmament. Unlike Reagan, he believes this requires an assertion of “moral” leadership, to be demonstrated simply by reducing our nuclear stockpile and refusing to modernize the U.S. arsenal. It’s a false premise…
Reagan recognized that the ultimate goal of arms negotiations is to make the world safer, more stable and more free. To eliminate the need for large nuclear arsenals, he went about eliminating the dependence — both ours and others’ — on massive nuclear attack as the guarantor of security.
Thus, the first items on Reagan’s agenda were building up U.S. conventional forces and introducing missile defenses. That allowed his negotiators to approach arms control agreements from a position of strength.
Obama has it backward. He started with cutting back on defense — especially in acquisition programs. Bye-bye, F-22.
He also cut missile defense, starting with systems to protect the homeland. But even that wasn’t enough to make the Russians happy.
“The problem is our America partners are developing missile defenses,” objected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last December. “Our partners may come to feel completely safe.” That sounds like a leader who still thinks that maintaining the threat of nuclear attack is a good idea. If not, why is it a “problem” for Americans to feel safe?
Reagan understood his adversaries. Obama does not.
Russia remains our adversary, although not in exactly the same way as before. To the problem of Iran and North Korea, two countries that were already adversaries back when Reagan was president but which have now become (or are about to become) nuclear adversaries of ours as well, Obama has no answer. Bush had no good answer either, but at least he did not telegraph a posture of appeasement and weakness, as Obama has.
Of course, it depends what you think Obama’s goal is. I believe that Obama wants to weaken our standing in the world vis a vis other nations, but even I don’t believe he wants us annihilated in the process. Following that logic, his stance on the subject appears to be the combination of knave and fool we’ve come to expect from the man.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4313618?cookieSet=1
Policy Implications of Nuclear Winter
Richard Turco and Carl Sagan
Ambio, Vol. 18, No. 7 (1989), pp. 372-376
such articles covered us with a false blanket, which has colored ALL our decisions as a nation since then.
just as peak oil was first discussed by our competitors russia, and then used as an excuse for us to hold off production (and increase what they can earn from the same material through artificial means). go ahead, look up the earliest history before the politics got to it.
in the above, you read that nuclear winter as a hypothesis has been confirmed.
how? did they make an ice age we didnt know about?
no..
its the SAME ASSURITY that AGW/Global warming has. fancy that it also had the UN involved heavily too.
But these were all either active measures, or things that active measures used to change policy
its where Sagan, soviets, Erlich, and others all met in their club of Rome kind of games.
The most cited example of “inappropriate” scientific meddling in political issues was the nuclear winter debate from the early 1980s championed by none other than Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich. Today it is most frequently used as a justification to cast doubt on the scientific consensus for global climate change. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, made headlines a few years ago when he gave a speech before the California Institute of Technology stating:
[N]uclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance. . . . I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2009/08/science_is_conservative.php
In 1983 Sagan penned an article entitled “The Nuclear Winter” for Parade magazine, a Sunday supplement that reached an audience of an estimated twenty million readers. This was the height of Reagan’s America, a place where rhetoric about “the evil Empire” was as pervasive as the idea that a nuclear war could be won (the fact that a policy known as MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction, actually existed and wasn’t immediately ridiculed is just one example illustrating the tenor of the time). After summarizing the evidence that would be published in the journal Science the following month, Sagan wrote to the American public that:
It is now almost 40 years since the invention of nuclear weapons. We have not yet experienced a global thermonuclear war — although on more than one occasion we have come tremulously close. I do not think our luck can hold forever. Men and machines are fallible, as recent events remind us. Fools and madmen do exist, and sometimes rise to power. Concentrating always on the near future, we have ignored the long-term consequences of our actions. We have placed our civilization and our species in jeopardy.
The next day, October 31st, Carl Sagan attended a conference in Washington, D.C. entitled “The Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War” headed by himself and Paul Ehrlich. Right on the heels of Sagan’s paper on nuclear winter, popularly known as TTAPS after the first letter of each authors’ last name, Paul Ehrlich also published a study that looked at the biological threat posed by nuclear winter. As reported by Time magazine:
Sagan and Ehrlich picked as their “baseline case” a 5,000 megaton war. . . The results of such a war: a cloud of dust and smoke weighing 1.2 billion tons rapidly envelops the Northern Hemisphere and swiftly swirls into the Southern Hemisphere as well, blocking out 90% or more of the sun’s light. Surface temperatures plunge to an average of –13° F and remain below freezing for three months, even if the war is fought in the Northern Hemisphere summer. Nothing can grow; those humans who survive the blast and radiation of the explosions freeze or starve to death. At best, Ehrlich figures, small bands of hunters and gatherers would be left in the Southern Hemisphere.
and guess who has the presidents ear? holdren, and holdren and those guys were friends.
1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a ‘basket’ of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined. An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama’s science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too — actually, especially — illustrate Montaigne’s axiom: ‘Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.'”
enjoy…
hope that stimulates the discussion a bit.
forgot the link to that last post.
Dark Green Doomsayers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/13/AR2009021302514.html
Remember, soviets were involved since BEFORE the US had nuclear weapons.
Reporter Michael Chapman, writing this summer in the weekly conservative tabloid Human Events, outlined the Communist Party connections of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.”
In 1995 Emory University professor Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress and Russian archivist Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov published The Secret World of American Communism, a collection of 92 documents that Klehr, a political scientist, accidentally stumbled across on a visit to Russia.
Those 92 documents show beyond a doubt that the perception many Americans had in the 1950s that “American communism was a Soviet weapon in the Cold War” was well-founded and not a fantasy spawned by right-wing paranoia, as many on the left charged. Some of the documents show Communists clandestinely active in the federal government during the 1940s and 1950s, just as Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy said time and again. And other documents prove that Moscow regularly funded Communist Party activity in the United States.
Additional information about American communism has followed. Early in spring 1998, Klehr and Haynes will publish a second volume of documents and commentary titled The Soviet World of American Communism, Klehr tells Insight, and other volumes will follow covering topics such as the Communist Party’s role in mainstream politics in America, the party’s relationship to its many intellectual supporters and the activities of American Communists in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.
These are things we USED to tell in the news and such, and when we did, we had a cold war. that is, the maintenance of the cold war was TRUTH. And on the other side, the best they had was false equivalence, which relativism made good enough.
“Those who insist plaintively on evidence against a force whose first concern is that there shall be no evidence against it, must draw what inferences they please.” Whittaker Chambers
In Witness, Chambers warned against another aspect of American communism — the protection it received from the “best” of society: academics, intellectuals, journalists and sundry others. “The forces of enlightenment” continually are at work “pooh-poohing the communist danger and calling every allusion to it a witch-hunt,” wrote Chambers
sounds familiar?
Reminds me of a quote from the Simpsons.
Mr. Burns, commenting on the movie “Schindler’s List”:
“Listen, Spielbergo, Schindler and I are like peas in a pod. We’re both factory owners, we both made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked damn it!”
So what do we now know?
Emory University’s Klehr, a longtime student of the CPUSA, says what amazed him most about the recent influx of data “was the extent to which the leadership was involved in espionage and covert activities.” It’s “breathtaking, the risks they took,”….
The new documents show that American journalists such as John J. Spivak, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edmund Stevens and Agnes Smedley were active in communist affairs — a fact suspected but never so fully verified as now. The case of Smedley is especially interesting because as recently as 1988 a biography, Agnes Smedley, Life and Times of an American Radical, described her as a “freelance revolutionary” unconnected with the Communist Party, to which she most certainly was connected.
The new documents “lend support,” in Klehr’s words, to the already substantial evidence that shows the presence of Communists in a number of New Deal Washington government agencies.
Revisionist historians have described this Communist presence as nothing more than “Marxist study groups.” The new evidence, however, doesn’t permit such a benign interpretation. Of particular interest are the Ware cell in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and several advisers to Wisconsin Sen. Robert LaFollette’s Civil Liberties subcommittee of the Senate Education and Labor Committee.
If you want to learn about nuclear weapons, i would also look at the wartime metal departments since uranium is a metal. and there was a lot of spying and things going around.
cant talk about current history, unless we are on the same page as to past history.
otherwise, we will get stuck on the validity of nuclear winter as a valid reason for some position, and refuse to understand that nuclear winter itself is a false position.
And what of Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”? As Chapman notes in Human Events, when the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954, Oppenheimer’s supporters cried foul and accused the AEC of “McCarthyism.”
The AEC charged that there was “substantial evidence of Dr. Oppenheimer’s association with communists, communist functionaries and communists who did engage in espionage.” His defenders denied the charges.
But Chapman says that former KGB official Yuri Kolesnikov told him in Moscow this summer that “Oppenheimer and other top scientists cooperated with us.” They weren’t Soviet agents, Kolesnikov said. But they “gave us information about the atom bomb,” first because they were fearful that Hitler might defeat the Soviet Union in World War II and later because Oppenheimer and the other scientists wanted to create a balance of power between the United States, which had the bomb, and the USSR, which didn’t.
Interestingly, as recently as Sept. 14, Theodore Hall, now 71 but in 1944 a 19-year-old physicist at Los Alamos, explained to the Associated Press that his motives in contacting a Soviet agent near the end of World War II was that he “was worried about the dangers of an American monopoly of atomic weapons.” Hall’s activities are discussed in Bombshell, a book on atomic-spy conspirators to be published in October.
Chapman argues that evidence shows Oppenheimer’s close association with Communists from the mid-1930s on, from Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty and younger brother Frank to figures such as Steve Nelson, a Yugoslav-born and naturalized American who was a central figure in clandestine Communist Party activity in the U.S.
It is of interest that Emory University’s Klehr believes his discovery of the American Communist Party documents in Russia was fortuitous and might not have happened. “I don’t think the officials knew what was in the archive where I found the documents,” he says, noting that official Russia now knows about the archive and, as a result, “a number of the documents have been reclassified and are no longer available.”
huge stuff..
big stuff..
they tried to keep up with Operation RYAN..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYAN
when they couldnt they toppled financially…
and since MAD was replaced with globalism, the end result was their keeping out of our monetary system, then pull the plug on it, since we were dumb enouhg to structure it that way after the fact
The purpose of the operation was “to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent, plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union – a delusion which reflected both KGB’s continuing failure to penetrate the policy-making of the main adversary USA and its recurrent tendency towards “conspiracy theory.”[1] It was initiated in May 1981 by KGB director Yuri Andropov, then chairman of KGB.
RYAN took on a new significance when Andropov took power in 1982, and particularly after the announcement of the planned deployment of the Pershing II missile to West Germany. These missiles were designed to be launched from road-mobile vehicles, making the launch sites very hard to find. The flight time from West Germany to European Russia was only four to six minutes (approximate flying time from six to eight minutes from West Germany to Moscow), giving the Soviets little or no warning.
On 23 March 1983, Ronald Reagan publicly announced development of the SDI program. Soviet leadership felt that the use of SDI technology was to render America invulnerable to Soviet attack, thereby allowing the US to launch missiles against the USSR with no fear of retaliation. This surprise attack concern prompted sudden expansion of the RYAN program. The worries reached its peak during KAL 007 shootdown and the NATO Exercise Able Archer 83 [1], the Soviet Union believed that a United States first strike on the Soviet Motherland was imminent.
Obama seems intent on replaying all the disastrous economic and foreign affairs policies of the 1930s. Let’s hope enough people are aware of the history of government intervention in the economy and appeasement to put the brakes on his agenda this November before we are damned to relive the Great Depression and world war.
So Obama convenes 42 (?) nations in a nuclear nonproliferation conference and what do you think are really talking about? “What will that dope do next?”
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/21/books/obama-reads-533.jpg
looks like he is reading a book about life after America
I just saw an interview with Graham Allison of harvard on CNN World. He was explaining the terrible dangers of terrorists getting atomic weapons and the purpose of Obama’s summit. How come this was considered scare mongering under the last administration? I’m beginning to think much of our populations suffers from ADS since they can’t seem to remember as far back as Obama’s last speech, much less what the lefties said six years ago.
OT, but still related to foreign policy:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/08/karzai_unhinged
Jeff Gedmin used to be director of Aspen Institute Berlin and was frequently on TV giving the US take on events. He also wrote a regular column for Die Welt. He always did an excellent job of explaining problems and told Germans who just said no to American policies on Iraq and terrorism that they hadn’t offered any alternatives. He is a thoughtful and very knowledgeable man, who now directs Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. This article is a report on Afghanistan and Karsai.
LOL J.L. I was just thinking of that quote myself 😀
Yep, His Divine Majesty The Bamma and Ronaldus Magnus. Vast similarities. Both worshipped weakness, flabbiness, good intentions. Right?
The mind reels at the vast windage of the Lib-Left in trying to ponzi President Reagan’s approach to Nukes to Mister Messiah’s.
Japan to investigate China warships near Okinawa
in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-47650820100413
apan said on Tuesday it would investigate the sighting of several Chinese submarines and warships last week in the high seas near the southern island of Okinawa, where U.S. bases are concentrated in Japan.
Two submarines and eight vessels were spotted on Saturday about 140 km (90 miles) southwest of Okinawa, the first time Japan has confirmed the presence of Chinese submarines and such a large number of vessels in the area, defence ministry officials said.
“Such a situation has not happened before and we will investigate this, including whether (China has) any intentions against our country,” Japanese Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa told reporters.
and of course after Obama bows to another leader, China reverses course.
China cools push for sanctions on Iran
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100413/pl_afp/usnuclearsummit
with the news reporting that the health care bill does nothing to prevent price increases (and they think thats a loophole. which when closed will result in insurance companies pulling out of the line, as they know through their actuarial tables exactly how much break even blood they can get from a turnip).
add this
Medical Schools Can’t Keep Up
As Ranks of Insured Expand, Nation Faces Shortage of 150,000 Doctors in 15 Years
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond
[one of the problems, and i dont know if they mention it, is that women dont stay for the full term of their careers. that under best of circumstances, they tend not to stay. remember recent studies pointing out that a percentage are attending to find husbands, not to actually have careers. not saying they shouldn’t, but such demographics tends not to be in the purview of the politicos who have decided to usurp powers not granted to them to fine tune society to their arbitrary liking. like making sure we have a nice gender balanced pastiche for them to see as they stroll the halls. Not content with dams and monuments, they seek to make people their clay for which to make a world that suits their predatory ideals]
we have a huge wave of inflation coming, not to mention that our lack of friends with pockets will insure that the plans go dead.
Want to see social pain and problems? When 40% of the country finds out they are not going to get any more checks for existing and staying out of the competition.
they are not going to care that its their own fault on both sides, they are just going to go nuts, as if that temper tantrum will get money to fall from the money tree and get productivity going again.
ever notice that they never start the historical financial graphs at the 1880s? but always 1929?
well, they would find that the roaring 20s were roaring for a reason…
The difference between the two presidents goes to a very basic level: defining the problem.
First, you have to define the problem. The problem is The World Is Not Safe. Then you start looking for solutions. Obama, like many on the Left, avoids such hard thinking and moves straight to preferred solutions. That’s the whole deal. They have a basket of things they can do, and go looking for places to apply them. They are not interested in solving problems, they are interested in proving to the rest of us that we need their solutions. So they can be important.