Earning His Nobel Prize

At last, a believable sighting of that peace president many of us thought we had elected. Give Barack Obama credit, big time, for the startling progress he has made in tempering the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review Report for the first time prohibits "first use" of nuclear weapons against nations complying with the nonproliferation treaty. It also pledges a halt to US efforts to modernize such weapons, as had been proposed by then-President George W. Bush in his call for new nuclear "bunker busters."

Whereas his predecessor succeeded only in eliminating the nonexistent Iraqi nukes, this president has forged a treaty with the Russians that will reduce the world's supply of the devil's weapons by one-third. But it was essential to follow that up with a clear departure from the always-insane policy that the United States has a right to develop and use such weapons as conventional tools of war.

That is the right that Harry Truman acted on in perpetrating the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history when he annihilated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is what spawned the nuclear arms race that so troubles us today, especially regarding North Korea and Iran.

Yet until Tuesday no American president had renounced the immoral claim that our nation had some God-granted right to use those weapons again. While we consistently insisted it was morally repugnant for any other state to follow in our footsteps, we continued to build ever deadlier versions of these intrinsically heinous weapons.

But that madness ended when Obama on Tuesday affirmed an all-important distinction that Bush, more than any other president, had insisted on blurring--the distinction between nuclear and all other weapons, including the chemical and biological varieties. Lumping them together as weapons of mass destruction denies the global life-ending threat that nukes alone present.