Rethinking Nuclear Policy

Four months into his presidency, at a summit in Prague, Barack Obama pledged to take “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet nearly eight years later, he presides over a program to modernize the entire US nuclear arsenal at a cost of $35 billion a year through the next decade and beyond. To those who accuse him of hypocrisy, Obama has said that he always regarded a nuclear-free world as a long-term goal, unlikely to be met in his lifetime, much less his time in office - and that his modernization program is de-signed not to build more or more deadly nuclear weapons but rather to maintain and secure the arsenal the United States has now.

"Rethinking Nuclear Policy" is from the September/October 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs.

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