President Limits Nuke Usage

I have mixed feelings about this, I will explain after the quote:

Via the NYT:

President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.

Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.

As I said above, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the idea of America being stoked to the hilt with Nukes on a hair trigger is not my idea of a good time. On the other hand, the idea of the United States not being able to defend itself is not a very comforting thought. Because I am not a partisan blogger, I will simply say this; I believe Obama is trying to strike a balance and trying to keep all parties happy. Which is not easy, when the people you are trying to make happy are not your biggest fans. Either way, it has to be a tough order.

Other Bloggers from ALL sides on this: Political Punch, CBS News, Ben Smith’s Blog, Power Line, The Corner on National …, Beltway Confidential, The Caucus, PoliBlog, Commentary, ATTACKERMAN, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Jihad Watch, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Independent, Fausta’s Blog, Hot Air, Pajamas Media, Scared Monkeys, Atlas Shrugs, Liberty Pundits dot net, Another Black Conservative, The Confluence, The Moderate Voice, The Atlantic Online, Israel Matzav, Guardian, News Hounds, Don Surber, YID With LID, Pundit & Pundette, The American Pundit, Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, The Page, And So it Goes in Shreveport, The Anchoress, The Lonely Conservative, JammieWearingFool, Gawker and Riehl World View