When It Comes To Nuclear Weapons, Biden Isn't Leading

Biden should lead on nuclear disarmament. Instead, he’s carrying the failed policies of the cold war.

By Khury Petersen-Smith, INKSTICK

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis become the defining, global, existential threats to humanity of the twenty-first century, we are also still living with one from the twentieth: nuclear weapons.

Climate change has impacts well beyond our control that we will have to deal with even if we make the changes necessary to stop it. And while policy can mitigate the spread of disease or make it much, much worse, infectious disease is a part of nature. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are entirely human creations. The threats posed by them are due solely to the governments that harbor them, and it is entirely the responsibility of those governments to eliminate them.

As the government that brought the weapons into the world, the only one to use them in war, and one that possesses one of the largest arsenals, the United States has a responsibility to take the lead on disarmament. Instead, it is doing the opposite.