5 Myths About the Bomb and Us

The Bush administration has made a fetish of "flexibility." "We don't know where the threats of the future are going to come from," one senior Pentagon official recently told reporters on the condition of anonymity. "A negotiated treaty might tie our hands in dealing with a future threat."

But there are very good reasons that we might want to "tie our hands" -- most obviously, to get something in return. For example, Russia keeps several thousand tactical nuclear weapons in the field. Encouraging Russia to dismantle these battlefield weapons would be strongly in our interest, even if the United States had made a few concessions regarding its own tactical nukes deployed in Europe.

Another reason to accept constraints is to improve Washington's ability to monitor and detect future threats. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) requires each party to provide the other side with information about its strategic forces, open some facilities to inspection and refrain from interfering with satellites and other means of verifying compliance. The Bush administration has complained that the verification process requires "cumbersome" paperwork. But the inconvenience of complying with START would be dwarfed by the task of collecting the information about Russia's arsenal without active Russian cooperation.

5. Reductions in U.S. forces don't matter to Iran or North Korea.

The Bush team loves this one. "There is absolutely no evidence," insisted a senior administration official, that U.S. nuclear reductions "have caused North Korean or Iranian leaders to slow down their covert programs to acquire capabilities to produce nuclear weapons."

Now, I don't know anyone who believes that Kim Jong Il would suddenly become a leading advocate of nonproliferation if the United States were to unilaterally disarm. But U.S. diplomats who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations will tell you that nonproliferation diplomacy -- whether securing an indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995, encouraging states to enforce their own export-control laws or agreeing to sanction states that violate their nonproliferation obligations -- has reliably been strengthened by U.S. commitments to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and implement NPT obligations to make good-faith efforts to move toward universal disarmament.

Sure, we may never quite achieve total nuclear disarmament. But it is still the ultimate goal supported by every president during the Cold War and post-Cold War period -- except George W. Bush.

Jeffrey Les directs the New America Foundation's Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative and blogs at ArmsControlWonk.com.