Obama and the Bomb

This book is the first study of how President Barack Obama and his administration used the negotiation and ratification of an arms control treaty, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), as a vehicle for advancing one of the president’s primary foreign policy objectives, a reset of US relations with Russia in the early years of his first term of office. It is a study of the administration’s efforts to move from a president’s strategic vision to defining that vision as a policy priority and ultimately, successfully negotiating what the president deemed the most first and most important element of the reset agenda. Frank Leith Jones is a distinguished fellow of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he taught in the Department of National Security and Strategy until his retirement in 2022. He is the author of Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy (2013) and Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age (2020). This book is the first study of how President Barack Obama and his administration used the negotiation and ratification of an arms control treaty, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), as a vehicle for advancing one of the president’s primary foreign policy objectives, a reset of US relations with Russia in the early years of his first term of office. It is a study of the administration’s efforts to move from a president’s strategic vision to defining that vision as a policy priority and ultimately, successfully negotiating what the president deemed the first and most important element of the reset agenda.