![]() As President Obama told Jay Leno this week, "There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality." And his missile industry wants to keep getting lucrative state contracts to build these behemoths. The Russians still see these obsolete weapons as totems of great power status. ![]() is developing and other issues he wants addressed before he will discuss nuclear cuts. ![]() He continues to pile on conditions about conventional forces in Europe, precision-strike weapons the U.S. More troubling, each nation has thousands of additional weapons in various stages of deployment or storage.īut Putin has been reluctant to engage in new talks to reduce these weapons. A mistake or miscalculation risks catastrophe. Most of these warheads are 10 to 50 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven decades ago. Both still have about 1,000 hydrogen bombs on missiles ready to launch at one another on 15-minutes notice. and Russia hold 95 percent of all nuclear weapons in the world. The item at the top of their list should be resuscitating stalled reductions of the nuclear arsenals left over from the Cold War. On Friday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry will meet with their Russian counterparts Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The presidents may not be meeting, but their senior officials are - and they have a chance to foster the cooperation necessary to address urgent nuclear threats confronting both nations. The cancelation of the bilateral meeting makes the U.S.-Russian talks in Washington this Friday that much more important. Putin’s domestic political capital and his already considerable self-esteem.” As the New York Times editorialized on August 6, the only result of a summit meeting “would be to add to Mr. At this point, there did not appear to be an outcome to the September summit that would be a gain for U.S. Their positions are closer on Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and the Middle East, but even here there are sharp differences. and Russia are far apart on Syria, missile defense, and further nuclear reductions. Beyond the Snowden flap, however, there was a deeper issue: the likelihood that Putin and Obama would not have any agreements to announce at a September summit. Great powers find a way to conduct their most serious business despite sharp disagreements. We talked to China while Mao dispatched tanks to North Vietnam. talked to the Soviets while they occupied Eastern Europe and sent dissidents to the gulags. But this incident, and the canceled summit, cannot be allowed to derail critical United States national security issues that require Russian cooperation.ĭuring the Cold War, the U.S. The White House was furious at Putin’s decision to grant whistleblower Edward Snowden temporary asylum in Russia. President Obama’s decision to cancel his scheduled September summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is problematic, but predictable.
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