It’s time to play guess the quote.
Who said this:
“There is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security, and that is to reduce the need for it. And this we are trying to do in negotiations with the Soviet Union. We are not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons. We seek, instead, to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.”
A) A bleeding heart, peacenik liberal?
B) Conservative saint Ronald Reagan in his Second Inaugural Address on January 21, 1985?
C) President Obama on the occasion of signing then biggest nuclear arms pact in a generation?
Surprisingly, the answer is B, and not C where President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday signed the first nuclear arms pact of its kind in two decades, but the answer is conservative saint Ronald Reagan. The pact signed Thursday will shrink the limit of nuclear warheads to 1,550 per country over seven years, but the good news is that it still allows for mutual destruction several times over.
So, it’s rather surprising that the President is being criticized for reaching the historic pact by conservatives from bloggers to the rightwing think tank the Heritage Foundation. One thing I have learned over the past year is that if President Obama brought about world peace, ended world hunger, helped find a cure for cancer and put a man on Mars Republicans would still find something to criticize him for.
One Michigan blogger is bemoaning the fact that this treaty reduces the ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) fleet. The treaty limits missile forces to 800 deployed and non-deployed intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, submarine launched ballistic missile launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons.
It has been 10 years since I retired from the Navy, but I’m surprised they still have SSBNs. They are a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.
The submarine’s only mission is to hide and launch its nuclear missiles when the end of the world is signaled. The submarine only surfaces long to replenish stores and change crews. It has a gold crew and blue crew that rotate every three months, but the sub is always deployed. I don’t know how much it cists to keep one deployed, but I know it’s not cheap.. How many times do we need to destroy the world?
The nine countries in the nuclear club that have nuclear weapons will, hopefully, never use them because of the mutual destruction concept, but a terrorist with a nuclear weapon will not hesitate to use it. That’s where our focus should be, and the more nuclear weapons there are, the higher the chance they will get their hands on one.
