Trust, don't verify, and hope!

Do you know about the Global Zero advocates? Peter Huessy writes about them at The Gatestone Institute. Instead of President Reagan's "trust, but verify" approach, Huessy writes that the Global Zero advocates want the Unite States to adopt a policy of "trust, don't verify, and hope" policy. Currently the U.S. has a Nuclear Triad of land-based nuclear missiles, submarines and bombers equipped with nuclear weapons, thus making it impossible for an enemy to cripple us from defending ourselves. The Global Zero advocates, according to Huessy, want the U.S. to

move our deployed warheads off alert, so they could not be used for days or months after a crisis occurred, certainly would give incentives to other parties in a conflict to have nuclear weapons at the ready so they could be used to defeat everybody else.

There are adversaries of the US that have, or are urgently attempting to acquire, nuclear weapons; adversaries that include Russia, China and North Korea, with Iran now projected to have sufficient nuclear material for a weapon as early as 2014. Will all of these nuclear powers actually put aside their nuclear weapons, making them unusable in a crisis?

Obama has selected Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense. Hagel is a Global Zero advocate.

Senator Hagel, while signing up to the timetable for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, also said in the 2009 Al Jazeera interview, that nuclear weapons can be abolished because they no longer need to play a traditional deterrent role. As part of this strategy, Hagel proposes to "de-alert" our weapons, making them unusable in a crisis. This raises the question of why any adversary would also volunteer to put its nuclear warheads in reserve and significantly delay its own ability to use such weapons, especially when doing so is largely unverifiable.

Read more here: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3562/global-zero-nuclear-weapons