The following op-ed appeared in the Grand Forks Herald this morning

President Barack Obama’s decision last week to scuttle missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic was the second time the U.S. has withdrawn a ground-based missile defense system.

In 1975, the Pentagon actually deployed a missile defense system codenamed Safeguard in North Dakota and supported by personnel from the Grand Forks and Minot Air Force bases. That system of interceptor missiles and ground-based radar was designed to counter the threat of a Soviet nuclear first-strike against launch sites in the Upper Midwest, but was canceled after less than a year, officially because of ineffectiveness and high cost.

The truth is that U.S. missile defense reversals then and now were motivated by broader strategic goals as much as considerations of expense and efficacy. In the mid-1970s, U.S.-Soviet arms control talks led to two landmark agreements (SALT I and II) which made Americans safer by reducing the likelihood of nuclear war. Pushing ahead with missile defense at that time might have convinced the Soviets the U.S. was not serious about arms control.

The situation is similar today. On the heels of the relationship “reset” announced by the Obama administration in March, the U.S. and Russia are engaged in bilateral talks aimed at scaling back both sides’ outdated nuclear arsenals and replacing a crucial arms control treaty (START), which is set to expire in December.

The missile defense sites in Eastern Europe had cast a pall over those talks, which are essential because failure to reach a deal with Russia could derail the president’s broader nuclear nonproliferation and arms control agenda.

At the top of the president’s list of goals, outlined in a speech in Prague in March, is revitalizing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the single instrument most important to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons for the past four decades.

The 9/11 Commission told us the greatest threat to U.S. security was the possibility that terrorists might acquire a nuclear weapon and use it to attack America. And the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more opportunities terrorists have to buy or steal them.

To avert this nightmare scenario will take broad-based global cooperation among nuclear and non-nuclear states. That is possible only if the U.S. holds up what the world views as our end of the nuclear security bargain.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. pushed hard for new multilateral efforts to curb nuclear proliferation and prevent nuclear terrorism, but at the same time neglected and even undermined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty’s “basic bargain” promises access to peaceful nuclear technology for countries that agree to renounce nuclear weapons on the condition that the world’s recognized nuclear powers — the U.S. and Russia being by far the biggest — commit to work toward nuclear disarmament.

Without the disarmament piece, the bargain falls apart.

That is why progress on U.S.-Russian arms control is so critical now and why the Obama administration was right to remove a possible stumbling block from the process. For the next step, it should not be hard to agree on credible cuts to arsenals on both sides.

According to the State Department, the U.S. maintains more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, and the Russians have just under 4,000. These bloated arsenals do little for our security, and both sides are prepared to cut deployed warheads to below their current maximum of 2,200.

With two months left before START expires, the time to strike a deal is now. Success on that front, in turn, could give the U.S. a boost in credibility and leverage when we ask the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s 188 other member states to fulfill their end of the basic bargain: keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of terrorists’ hands to prevent the ultimate nightmare of a nuclear Sept 11.

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