President Barack Obama on Tuesday will unveil a retooled US nuclear strategy that he has signalled will call for reducing the size and role of the country's atomic weapons stockpile. Though there are questions whether Obama's changes will be far-reaching or mostly cosmetic, the much-anticipated announcement could build momentum before he signs a landmark arms-control treaty with Russia in Prague on Thursday and hosts a nuclear security summit in Washington next week.
The Nuclear Posture Review is required by Congress from every US administration, but Obama set expectations high after he vowed to end "Cold War thinking" and won the Nobel Peace Prize in part for his vision of a nuclear-free world. Obama said last month the new plan, delayed by months of internal deliberations, would "reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, even as we maintain a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent."
He now faces the challenge of lending credibility to his arms control push while not alarming allies under the US defence umbrella or limiting room to manoeuvre in dealing with emerging nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea. Obama's conservative critics say his approach so far has been naive and could endanger US national security.
The review, which is widely expected to scale back some Bush-era policies, will be a test of Obama's effort to make controlling nuclear arms world-wide one of his signature foreign policy initiatives. It is also important because it will affect defence budgets and weapons deployment and retirement for years to come. "The president will unveil the nuclear posture review that he and others have been working on for quite some time," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Monday. "Nuclear security is one of the issues that the president is most focused on in foreign policy," he said. But he gave no details on the review itself.
DEBATE ON FIRST-USE There is believed to have been lengthy debate among Obama's aides and military officials over whether to declare that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a crisis but would act only in response to attack.
Most arms control experts believe Obama will not go as far as forswearing the first-strike option but might instead narrow the circumstances for using US nuclear might. The Bush administration had threatened to use nuclear arms to pre-empt or respond to chemical or biological attacks.
Obama could drop that threat for non-nuclear countries in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and thus not working on developing their own atomic bombs. experts say. The US leader has also faced pressure from some liberal lawmakers in his own Democratic Party to adopt language saying the sole purpose of US nuclear arsenal is to deter other countries from using their atomic weapons.
With defence officials digging in against such a change, experts say Obama is more likely to retain more ambiguous wording that deterrence is just the primary purpose. That would leave open the nuclear option against US enemies that might threaten biological or chemical attack or transfer nuclear material to groups like al Qaeda. Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will sign a new START pact on Thursday, close to a year after the US president's Prague speech laying out his vision for eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Obama acknowledged, however, that the process might not be completed in his lifetime.