Gates Says Obama Plan Strengthens European Missile Defense

A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in the New York Times [link]

• Last week, President Obama — on my recommendation and with the advice of his national-security team and the unanimous support of our senior military leadership — decided to discard that plan in favor of a vastly more suitable approach.
• This will be a far more effective defense should an enemy fire many missiles simultaneously — the kind of attack most likely to occur as Iran continues to build and deploy numerous short- and medium-range weapons.
• The bottom line is that there will be American missile defense in Europe to protect our troops there and our NATO allies. The new proposal provides needed capacity years earlier than the original plan, and will provide even more robust protection against longer-range threats on about the same timeline as the previous program. We are strengthening — not scrapping — missile defense in Europe.

Missile Defense’s Shelving Reflected Military’s Concerns – Washington Post [link]

• More than 13 years ago, the nation's military leaders told civilian defense officials they wanted to limit spending on missile defenses and to emphasize the protection of forces deployed overseas over defense of the American homeland against a long-range missile threat.
• [George W. Bush’s] expansion of the annual missile defense budget from $3.7 billion to an all-time high of $9 billion in 2007 provoked controversy inside and outside the Pentagon. So did his deployment of long-range missile interceptors in a system that the Pentagon's testing office said did not offer "a high degree of confidence in its limited capabilities."
• Military resentment at the program's special treatment was expressed in an August 2008 study by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analyses. It called for "increased interaction between the MDA and other relevant parts of DOD" -- a polite way of demanding the program pay more attention to real-world military needs and applications.
  

Barack Obama Ready to Slash US Nuclear Arsenal – The Guardian [link]

• Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.
• The Obama strategy is to create disarmament momentum in the run-up to the non-proliferation treaty review conference next May, in the hope that states without nuclear weapons will not side with Iran, as they did at the last review in 2005, but endorse stronger legal barriers to nuclear proliferation, and forego nuclear weapons programmes themselves.

New Nuclear Resolve – UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband in the Guardian [link]

• This week, Barack Obama will chair a summit of the UN security council to discuss nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
• Get it right, and we will increase global security, pave the way for a world without nuclear weapons and improve access to affordable, safe and dependable energy – vital to tackle climate change. Get it wrong, and we face the spread of nuclear weapons and the chilling prospect of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.
• Multilateral disarmament has always suffered from the suggestion that it lacked either principle or idealism. We have a chance to show it embodies both, and to signal the international community's intent to take action across the entire range of nuclear issues.

Half a Ton of Uranium – and a Long Flight – Washington Post [link]

• Col. Korbator handed Andy Weber a piece of paper. On the paper was written: U235, 90 percent, 600 kilos. Weber did the calculation: 1,322 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough to make about 24 nuclear bombs.
• The piece of paper was a glimpse into what had become the most urgent proliferation crisis to follow the collapse of the Soviet Union: the discovery of tons of nuclear materials left behind by the Cold War arms race, much of it unguarded and unaccounted for.
• This is the story of Project Sapphire, the code name for an early pioneering mission to secure a portion of those nuclear materials before they could fall into the wrong hands.

A View from the Dark Side

Our Missile-Defense Race Against Iran – Ilan Berman in the Wall Street Journal [link]

• The Bush-era plan is the best in a series of realistic alternatives for protecting not only our troops and international partners, but the U.S. homeland as well.