Now that being stop-Trump is the Republican emphasis, everything he says is taken as a radical invention or a show of political ignorance. On closer examination, all of those issues have been questioned in the past, or backed by outlier groups, or amazingly left un-discussed in this campaign season. Since I am concerned about nuclear weapons policies, I will comment on them here.
All Republicans seem to agree that the US and allies deal with ending Iran’s nuclear program and capability for a decade or more is somehow faulty and must be abandoned as soon as the Republican President is elected. How does this response differ from Trump’s questioning our nuclear commitments with our allies? Most people are unaware that the community of nuclear weapon scientists and non-proliferation specialists have backed it as a good deal. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz is one of them.
Over the years, even the Japanese have discussed whether to develop their own nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions have also been speculated about. The thing that has probably shocked most people and me, is that Trump may think creating more nuclear powers is a way to save money. Every time you add another nuclear power, you have to add a layer of nuclear weapons planning and response, which is a costly project. The other disturbing thing is that Trump publicly throws these ideas of altering long standing agreements around as if they are not firm commitments. The hypocritical thing for Republicans is that the candidates and congressmen have discussed throwing out the Iran agreement without any vote by Congress, public discussion, discussion with our European allies, with Israel, or any study by the new foreign policy advisers and the new Secretary of State, who has to be approved by the new Senate. In fact, the US and European nuclear agreement with Iran has actually removed the incentive and any justification for Saudi Arabia to become a nuclear power.
Japan has built one of two expensive plants to extract Plutonium from its spent nuclear fuel. If it decides to go nuclear, it has a great stockpile of available fissionable material. It also has an advanced satellite launching industry. The United States has followed a policy of disposing of spent nuclear fuel so that there is not a stockpile of it potentially available.
Where does Ted Cruz come into this, other than criticizing Trump? If you look on his website, tedcruz.org, there is no discussion of any of these issues, other than tearing up the Iran agreement. His defense page is, however, dominated by a picture of a bomber that looks like a B-52. We know what those can be used for.
Ted Cruz’s defense policy is very simple. We should decide what is best for America, and do that. That will also be best for the rest of the world. Really? That essentially means that we are bound by no agreements that we have ever signed, since they contain obligations which certainly will inconvenience and threaten us and our military. This reminds us of the Dick Cheney (Bush) policy, initially, of only following agreements that we felt like.
Ted Cruz has often spoken of rebuilding the military, and the size of the navy. The US Navy has around 250 ships. Each of the main submarines and aircraft carriers carry more destructiveness than the entire pre-World War I Navy that Cruz and Rubio use for a ship count. On Cruz’s website there is also a comparison the the incredible size of the US Navy at the height of World War II of 6,700 ships. No mention that most of these were probably PT patrol boats and small landing craft. The surprising non-relevance of this number is that Cruz is on the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and a member of the Subcommittee on Sea Power.
It is good that these issues have now entered the political discussion, since the leading Republican candidates seem very unprepared on these issues, and they deserve discussion. The discussion following them has, however, disappeared under the important discussions of the anti-abortion movement, and of Trump’s treatment of women and women’s issues.
