the Informer

Late last week, Russia and the United States came to an agreement and signed a treaty that would mean the reduction of each international superpower’s nuclear arms. Presidents Barack Obama and Dimitry Medvedev signed the treaty on April 8, meaning a few things for diplomatic relations between the countries and their allies and enemies.

The treaty agreed on by the two governments would mean that both nation’s stockpiles would get reduced to 1,500 nuclear warheads. While the two may call the START Treaty a “strategic arms reduction” initiative, this is hardly reduction to respectable levels; the amount of nukes the countries are reducing to is still enough to cause Mutually Assured Destruction two times over.

The concept of strategic arms reduction is very idealistic, indeed, but the execution of this concept is flawed. Yes, it’s nice to get these things in writing, but to say that a government seven years from now will have gotten rid of some weapons, but still has enough to kill every living human being on this planet, isn’t enough. Where’s the progress in that? I’m not against approaching complex issues with incrementalism, because it is a bad idea to leap into a situation that might not be beneficial for either country.

No, incrementalism isn’t bad. What’s bad is how much of this feels less than a leap, less than a skip, less than a hop, less than a step, less than a baby step and more like a crawl.

A very slow, crawl towards a world without nuclear weapons. While Russia has lost much of its power since its days as the Soviet Union, they still have some pull in European countries. And Obama should be using the power he wields as one of the most powerful world leaders to drag other heads of state along with him. He can do it as much as any competent president we’ve had in the past.

He’s great at explaining and distilling complex issues that he could be able to sell this idea not only to Congress–who will vote to ratify this treaty–but to the rest of the world. This should be a signalling point to the rest of the world, saying to everyone that nuclear weapons are a dangerous threat and we need to get rid of them.

With the new START treaty, I feel like it’s less of a START and more like a PRE-GAME for the moment when many of the nations of the world get on board and realize the existential threat these leaders possess and are able to prevent.