The Facts:

President Barack Obama recently signed a treaty with Russia to curb the total number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550. He also rewrote the U.S.’s nuclear posture.

Our Opinion:

Making the world a safer place is always noble. Weakening the U.S.’s nuclear deterrence ability, thereby making the world more dangerous, isn’t so noble.

The U.S. and Soviet Union spent a large portion of the post-World War II era trying to match each other in a conventional- and nuclear-arms race. Even 20 years after the end of the Soviet Union, the combined nuclear arsenal of Russia and the U.S. still exceeds 20,000 warheads.

The newly announced treaty forged by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and President Barack Obama will reduce the strategically deployed level from the START II level of 2,200 warheads to 1,550 for each country, but doesn’t provide any real benefit to the U.S. or its allies.

In fact, when taken in union with Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. has dramatically weakened its nuclear position.

Obama’s stated goal of a nuclear-free world is naïve and fails to address the important role deterrence plays. Likewise, his promise in the review to never use nuclear force against non-nuclear nations, even if they attack the U.S. or its allies with non-conventional weapons, completely undermines our nuclear presence.

The entire point of having a nuclear deterrent is being able to point to it, as the U.S. did during the Cold War, to show the consequences of aggressive action.

It’s an inherently flawed concept that essentially invites the U.S.’s enemies to use dirty means against us with the promise that they’ll only face conventional retaliation.

The new deployment total, while certainly a goodwill showing, has little to no meaning in light of the destructive power those arsenals have; the Earth would still be reduced to ash if 3,100 nuclear warheads were scattered across the planet.

When the Kremlin crumbled, nuclear arms ceased to be an issue of protection from Russia; but they remained an incredibly powerful deterrent for an increasingly indebted superpower.

Obama’s desire to make the world a safer place is honorable, but too many countries rely on America’s nuclear dominance as a means for their own protection for him to give out such dramatic concessions.

As a result, nuclear proliferation could actually gain momentum if more countries feel threatened by the U.S.’s announcement to stop being the world’s nuclear umbrella.