Nuclear Gauntlet

President Obama's outreach intentions with respect to forging a new understanding and if possible, an alliance with Russia, is eminently needful, let alone practical. To move toward a mutual decision to reduce their inventory of nuclear warheads is a sound one, much overdue. Picking up from where they left off, before relations between the United States and Russia suffered a setback, mostly as a result of former President Vladimir Putin's tactics in attempting to restore the country's hegemonic traditions with recalcitrant neighbours.

And partially as a result of the United States's usual practise of swaggering international bully and international protector of the world at large. In which pursuit some fairly substantial errors have been made historically. Catastrophic in some areas, where their decision-making has resulted in the deaths, through orchestrated conflict, of hundreds of thousands of the world's inhabitants. Clearly a great world power has much responsibility to account for its rash moves on the world stage.

And clearly, there is nothing that the America of today can do to excuse itself for its part in reducing the world population through international strife undertaken mostly to champion its values and its way of life, not actually transferable to most other parts of the world. A reality that has been slow to be fully understood. President Barak Obama is undertaking a transformation in U.S. policies, but U.S. values are immutable, so the end result will be instructive.

In the meantime, reduction of nuclear armaments is a good step in the right direction. It would have been even better undertaken rigorously and emphatically earlier, before the current situation in the international community took on its current sinister mantel of nuclear ownership where it is clearly an even greater danger than it had been formerly with two world powers facing off with their MAD agenda.

Matters only become more complex as time goes by. With North Korea and its nuclear soul-partner Iran in imminent ownership of nuclear weaponization of a type that can and may in time completely unsettle the world in a way up until now unimaginable. Russia's enterprise in assisting Iran in its nuclear agenda is certainly not to be overlooked. The U.S. reaction to Iran's obvious agenda is what, ostensibly, has caused it to position radar posts in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland.

Which placements have caused Russia to issue bellicose threats for retaliation, making common cause with Latin American countries thumbing their collective political noses at America. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is looking for an exchange with U.S. President Barack Obama; removal of the infrastructures that Russia sees as a threat to their political position in their territory, and the nuclear arsenals can be mutually reduced. As a sweetener, American planes can overfly Russian airspace into Afghanistan.

Look at the proposed reductions; fewer than 1,700 warheads for each country, from their current 2,200 for the U.S. and 2,800 for Russia. How effective is that? Does 1,700 each really represent other than tokenship reduction? These are negotiating moves in a deadly game of one-upsmanship.