Barack Obama Wants the Bomb …
As a candidate, Barack Obama declared war on nukes, but now he's calling a tactical truce. To encourage tougher international action against proliferation, he hopes to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The idea of outlawing weapons tests was so divisive that the Senate said no in 1999, and Republicans are ready to fight if Obama tries again. To buy them off, Obama will propose updating America's aging nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex and funding design work that would tiptoe to the very edge of crafting a new warhead, according to a senior official's recent briefing to a small group of outside experts. (Candidate Obama pledged "not to authorize the development of new nuclear weapons and related facilities.") Meanwhile, the Pentagon, working on a new "nuclear posture review," is contemplating a force of 1,000 weapons deployed and 2,000 in reserve. That's well below the 1,675 agreed to in Moscow this May, with 2,500 currently in reserve, but it dismays some of those who have been briefed. "It's Bush Lite," says one, speaking anonymously to preserve his access. "That's not what Obama promised."
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John Barry joined Newsweek's Washington bureau as national-security correspondent in 1985. He has reported extensively on American intervention in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia and on efforts for peace in the Middle East. In 2002 he co-wrote The War Crimes of Afghanistan, which won a National Headliner Award. He won the 1993 Investigative Reporters & Editors Gold Medal for his investigation of the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes, as well as a 1983 British Press Award—the British equivalent of a Pulitzer—for his reconstruction of the U.S.-Soviet negotiations to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.
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