Reply #8: Thanks, babylonsister!

[Undercurrent]

I posted the same topic before I saw you had, so I deleted that post, and will post part of my OP here.

I'm happy about this. It's not to good to be too hopeful, but this is good.

I was a little kid when the potential of the world becoming a nuclear dead zone was pressed into our collective consciousness. I grew up with "duck and cover" drills, fall out shelters, and nightmares about the end of the life as we know it as a result of a nuclear exchange. Hope that sane minds would prevail was all I had. Now to have the President of the United States call for a nuclear-free world... well is a new day, and a first step in the right direction.



By JONATHAN S. LANDAY AND WARREN P. STROBEL
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama will outline in a major speech on Sunday a blueprint for ridding the world of nuclear weapons that calls for the United States to reduce its reliance on history's deadliest arms and lead a new international effort to prevent terrorists from acquiring them.

The plan would reverse the previous administration's policy that made nuclear weapons a central pillar of U.S. security policy by preserving an arsenal of thousands of warheads, expanding the targets against which they could be used and embracing the development of new weapons.

Under Obama's proposals, the United States also would return to its earlier policy of negotiating complex international arms agreements, an approach that the George W. Bush administration viewed as being too cumbersome and restricting of U.S power.

Obama's plan reflects the idea that the dangers posed by the spread of nuclear arms can be curbed only if the United States leads in bolstering the global non-proliferation system, which experts say was badly eroded by the Bush policy, and by the Iranian, North Korean, Israeli, Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/984758.html