Significance of Obama's Nuclear Posture Report

Obama and Medvedev toast following signing of new treaty

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. The Nation

Republicans like having the option of destroying people with nuclear weapons:

The answer is that we have become inured to the danger and lulled into accepting these weapons as usable implements of war, an attitude reflected in Tuesday's reaction by Arizona Republican Senators Jon Kyle and John McCain, who in a joint statement denounced Obama's policy as limiting the nuclear "option." They repeated the old canard that nuclear weapons are a legitimate choice in response to a non-nuclear threat.
That will be the line of those who oppose the Senate's ratification of the new START agreement with Russia and the long-overdue passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If they win in that debate there is no serious possibility of progress in preventing the further proliferation of nuclear weapons and breaking the death wish of those who still toy with the idea that such weapons are legitimate. Those in the peace movement who think Obama should have gone further in his efforts to put the nuke genie back in the bottle should tread carefully here. Instead of demanding perfection, they should be gratified that we finally have a president who has at least laid down some important markers of progress.

Obama needs 8 republicans to ratify the treaty that he and Dmitry Medvedev signed in Prague. Read Obama's statement on the Nuclear Posture Review here.