Obama's Early Views On Nuclear Disarmament

Revealing an extraordinary piece of history, The New York Times on Sunday had an article about President Barack Obama’s long-held views for a nuclear free world, particularly as set forth in a journalistic article he wrote while a student at New York City's Columbia University in 1983.

The article written by then-student Obama was mostly a journalistic profile of two student groups at Columbia: Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. But it also contained several nuggets showing Obama’s own views as a young man, such as when he criticizes the nuclear freeze movement in academic debate about nuclear fighting capabilities, quoting a line from a Peter Tosh reggae song: "Everyone is asking for peace, but nobody’s asking for justice." He writes: "One is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease."

Later in the article, Obama compares U.S. policy in the Ronald Reagan era to the appeasement of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, saying U.S. policy typically prefers to "leave the established order in place." He asserts that the United States still had not learned the meaning of democracy and a key lesson from Nazism, which he says promotes "blind obedience to authority." Unlike its welcoming acceptance of Hitler in 1933, Obama continues, the United States fears the Green movement in Germany because the Greens seek to upset the order of things, because they are a "group of anti-establishment pacifists with unusual ideas and uncomfortable answers to hard questions."

Altogether, it's a stunning look into the mind of the young Obama, and for those who advocate global nuclear disarmament, a hopeful sign that the United States president will indeed genuinely work toward his oft-stated goal of a “nuclear free world” — starting with today's announcement of a deal with Russia.