Life has been hard of late for the handful of journalists, academics, and pundits who have made a profession of being distraught over U.S. nuclear weapons and policies. Credible polls show that a majority of the public appreciates the value of U.S. nuclear capabilities, and the size of that majority has been increasing for over a decade.
Since coming to office, the Bush administration has rapidly succeeded in gaining the high ground on the issue of nuclear weapons. It decided on deep strategic nuclear reductions, and then codified them in an agreement with Moscow without the usual arms-control trappings of decade-long negotiations and 1,000-page treaties. Critics had called the administration’s approach naïve. Yet it triumphed in record time, and in doing so stole the Left’s thunder and most of its favorite lines. Antinuclear activists were left to mutter that the agreed two-thirds reduction in deployed strategic weapons hadn’t been achieved in their favored old, Cold War style. Most Americans figured that was a good thing.
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