This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 7, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Carefully reducing nuclear arsenals has been a goal of U.S. Presidents for a long time,

but continued U.S. commitments to place allies under an umbrella of

protection makes reducing those arsenals all the more challenging. It may not be

surprising then according to Chris Preble, Director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute,

that the Obama plan seems less than impressive.

Well, I think the report tells us that the signals that both candidate Obama and President Obama has been sending

are that the United States would like to reduce the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy.

Again, that's not a new thing.

That's the commitment we made under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty many years ago.

The challenge has been that it's difficult to do that.

And I think one of the key things for me in reading the report is it reminds us of just how important the US defense of others is in our overall

posture not just our nuclear posture posture, but our overall military posture, over and over again

in this document, it reaffirms the United States commitment, the importance of the security

umbrella.

Now, you know, the reason why we shifted to nuclear

weapons in the first place back in the 1950s was because they had a deterrent

value that was far greater on a dollar for dollar basis than tens of thousands of

US troops standing in West Germany for example. And so we are now at a place where as the role of nuclear weapons is reduced as the number of nuclear weapons has come down quite dramatically of course since the Cold War.

This document reaffirms that while

we're drawing down nuclear weapons and hoping to continue in that direction we

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