America Needs Nuclear Weapons—and the World Needs Us to Have Them

Review: Brad Roberts, ‘The Case for Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century’

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Upon entering office and throughout his presidency, President Barack Obama in various pronouncements made clear his intention to overturn this link between foreign and military policy. During a visit to Hiroshima, Japan in May, the president intoned that there needed to be a “moral revolution” to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Obama’s perspective coincides with an era in which the United States is fighting “small wars” against adversaries incapable of inflicting the type of catastrophic damage against the United States or its allies that guided U.S. nuclear policy in the Cold War era.