EVERY TIME Barack Obama announces that he is in favor of a world free of nuclear weapons, the nuclear hawks descend. Soon after his inauguration, former–Reagan administration Pentagon official Frank Gaffney proclaimed that the president “stands to transform the ‘world’s only superpower’ into a nuclear impotent.” After Obama promised in his 2009 Prague speech that “the United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons,” former–Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger declared that “the notion that we can abolish nuclear weapons reflects on a combination of American utopianism and American parochialism.” And when the president won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his embrace of the disarmament vision, Time Magazine even ran an essay entitled “Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel.”
Obama is right to declare, loudly and often, that the United States seeks a world without nuclear weapons, and the administration is right to be taking concrete steps now toward that long-term goal. Indeed, by proclaiming that America seeks nuclear zero, Obama is simply reaffirming that we will follow our treaty commitments: states that joined the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” And since Article 6 of America’s Constitution says that a treaty commitment is “the supreme Law of the Land,” at a basic level, Obama is simply saying that he will follow U.S. law.
