It’s simple really, says Elaine Scarry:
Last spring I went, as did many other people, to the UN when they had a conference in preparation for next spring’s Nonproliferation Treaty review. Country after country said, “We want a guarantee that the United States will never target us with a nuclear weapon.” I mean, that may seem ho-hum to us. But imagine now if you’re a citizen of this other country and you don’t feel an absolute guarantee that the United States won’t do this?
In the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, President Obama wanted to present an improvement—and it was an improvement. But do you know what its improvement was?
It said, “We will not use nuclear weapons against any country that is a signer of the Nonproliferation Treaty and themselves do not have nuclear weapons, but we also reserve the right to change our mind.” Okay? Now, you think, “We won’t use them against countries that don’t have them? Wasn’t that always something we had a rule about?” Well, apparently not. This was seen as a big breakthrough. That’s as close as we have to a step forward. So I do think, you know, I think next spring, country after country is going to say, “The nuclear states still haven’t made enough progress. They have not honored Article 6 which requires them to abolish their nuclear arms.”
Jeffrey Lewis addresses another nuclear issue – the US government’s denial that Israel has nukes:
One obvious downside to our absurd policy of refusing to acknowledge Israel’s bomb is that it ends up being enforced in an arbitrary and capricious manner. When Bob Gates, during his 2006 confirmation hearing to be secretary of Defense, referred to Iran being surrounded by nuclear-armed neighbors including “the Israelis to the West,” nothing happened — even though he had served as director of central intelligence and maintained his clearances. I’ve certainly heard plenty of current and former officials, in private conversation, state the obvious. It’s hard not to mention. Hell, even Ehud Olmert, when he was Israeli prime minister, slipped up once. As a result, the classification is little more than a handy excuse to prosecute someone we don’t like for some other reason — such as writing annoying articles about disarmament while working for a nuclear weapons lab or something.
There is one simple solution to this problem. Change WPN-136 Foreign Nuclear Capabilities to declassify the “fact” that the United States intelligence community has believed that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1970s. That’s it. We don’t have to declassify the details of the stockpile. And we don’t have to hold a press conference. (WPN-136 is classified anyway, so there will be no roll-out.) But U.S. officials should be free to acknowledge the obvious without fear of losing their clearances and their jobs. That’s all.
The Dish 