New Think and Old Weapons

Editorial: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28sun1.html?ref=opinion

Summary: President Obama is soon to deliver the "nuclear posture review," a review made every four years to make a statement about the United States' arsenal. The author points out how the U.S. and Russia have a combined 20,000 nuclear weapons, dubbed "cold war relics" by Obama. He (the author) says that this is an absurd amount as only a fraction of that number would be necessary to destroy the entire world, let alone one single country if a nuclear war was started. Thus the author believes that an arms reduction treaty between at least the U.S. and Russia is necessary, and ideally a shared reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons in the world.
Opinion: I, too, believe that there is an obvious need for arms reduction across the entire world, the problem is countries like China, who have between 300 and 500 nuclear weapons, scare us, the U.S. Also the "chillingly" vulnerable warheads in Russia, some 3,000, are at risk of falling into the wrong hands. No one is willing to be the first to reduce its insurance of safety or rather its nuclear weapons. As the editorial states, these weapons are realistically never going to be used, they are simply a way of stopping any other nation using them on one's own country. Obama has stated goals of reducing the 2,000 readily available nukes to around 1,500: a start.