According to the Manchester Guardian, the cancellation of the missile shield in Poland is just the start of something really daring and broad - if Obama can get the military establishment to swallow it.
From this link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.
'A multilateral process in which weapons states agree to radical disarmament'
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.
Those options include:
• Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.
• Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.
• Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.
The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: "Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."
The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.
That bargain is at the heart of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is up for review next year amid signs it is unravelling in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.
[snip]
Russia has approximately 2,780 deployed strategic warheads, compared with around 2,100 in the US. The abandonment of the US missile defence already appears to have spurred arms control talks currently underway between Washington and Moscow: the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, said today that chances were "quite high" that a deal to reduce arsenals to 1,500 warheads each would be signed by the end of the year.
[snip]
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.
"The review has up to now been in the hands of mid-level bureaucrats with a lot of knowledge, but it's knowledge drawn from the cold war. What they are prepared to do is tweak the existing doctrine," said Rebecca Johnson, the head of the Acronym Institute, a pro-disarmament pressure group. "Obama has sent them it back saying: 'Give me more options for what we can do in line with my goals. I'm not saying it's easy, but all you're giving me is business as usual.'"
If we thought health care reform was going to be a big, worthwhile challenge, this one dwarfs it. But like HC reform, Obama is going to need a big push to prevent him from chickening out, and a lot of help to battle the unleashing of right-wing propaganda and scare tactics an order of magnitude worse than what we've seen.
This isn't just about the possibility of nuclear war, but the certainty that our country will go broke without massive cuts in defense spending. That money is needed in countless other places. Conventional weapons spending now dwarfs nuclear spending. Yet our fear of challenging militarists on any weapons issue whatsoever keeps the war factories humming. The biggest issue is why the United States must dominate the world militarily in the first place. If we discredit the arguments for nuclear domination, people will feel safer about questioning our ever-growing empire of foreign bases (130 countries and counting).
This is it. This is the only really radical issue that Obama seems willing to expend any political capital on. Are we ready to take to the streets against the inevitable pro-war teabaggers?