Obama�s nuclear strategy

He thinks that he is being a wise leader but instead, he is a tone-deaf ruler. From the New York Times:

Obama�s New Nuclear Strategy Is Intended as a Message to Iran and North Korea
At the heart of President Obama�s new nuclear strategy lies a central gamble: that an aging, oversize, increasingly outmoded nuclear arsenal can be turned to the new purpose of adding leverage to the faltering effort to force Iran and North Korea to rethink the value of their nuclear programs.

The 50-page �Nuclear Posture Review� released on Tuesday acknowledged outright that �the massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the cold-war era� is �poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorist and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.�

Nonetheless, the new strategy aims to use the arsenal to do just that, despite considerable skepticism that any new doctrine or set of White House announcements is likely to change the calculus for North Korea or Iran.

Mr. Obama�s new strategy makes just about every nonnuclear state immune from any threat of nuclear retaliation by the United States. But it carves out an exception for Iran and North Korea, labeled �outliers� rather than the Bush-era moniker of �rogue states.� The wording was chosen, Mr. Obama�s senior advisers said, to suggest they have a path back to international respectability � and to de-targeting by the United States.

Obama is outlining what defense strategy we will employ if someone attacks us and specifically directs that we will not use nukes if the attacking nation does not have advertised nuclear capabilities. If the nation has nuclear capabilities, they are 'welcomed' into the club and nothing else changes. What saved our bacon during the cold war of the 1950's and 1960's is that Russia knew that we would throw everything we had back at them if they attacked and despite their having the largest bomb in the world at the time, we had more of them and better targeting. This deterrent carried us through up to 09/11/2001 when we had been soft enough for long enough that a couple yahoos decided to take a jab at us and see what we would do. Now that Iran and North Korea are arming themselves (and, I suspect, developing marketable nukes for anyone with enough cash), the equation changes and we really need to be walking down a different path than the one that Obama is taking us.