The just-released Nuclear Posture Review Report contains the following:

Pursuing the recommendations of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review will strengthen the security of the United States and its allies and partners and bring us significant steps closer to the President’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

The conditions that would ultimately permit the United States and others to give up their nuclear weapons without risking greater international instability and insecurity are very demanding. Among those conditions are success in halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, much greater transparency into the programs and capabilities of key countries of concern, verification methods and technologies capable of detecting violations of disarmament obligations, enforcement measures strong and credible enough to deter such violations, and ultimately the resolution of regional disputes that can motivate rival states to acquire and maintain nuclear weapons. Clearly, such conditions do not exist today.

But we can – and must – work actively to create those conditions.

These statements and the philosophy they would appear to represent are dangerously naive and utopian. Nuclear weapons have very likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives by deterring large-scale conventional wars among the major powers (in addition to the American and Japanese lives saved by ending the war). Without the nuclear deterrent, Western Europe would have come under Soviet domination. Israel would have ceased to exist. The collapse of the Soviet Union very likely would not have occurred.  China would have overrun South Korea and Taiwan and probably have remained totalitarian.

One only hopes that the Obama administration does not really believe its own rhetoric and has a better understanding of history and the way the world works than suggested by this report.