The administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009) emphasized that the U.S. and Russia were no longer enemies and that the U.S. would no longer plan or shape its nuclear force to deter a Russian threat. Instead, the U.S. would maintain the capacity to respond to any potential adversary and focus on how it would fight rather than those against whom it would fight. Moreover, the U.S. would combine nuclear weapons with missile defenses , conventional weapons and a responsive infrastructure in order to assure its allies, persuade the enemies not to attack, deter conflict and defeat adversaries. The Bush administration announced that the U.S. would reduce the number of its operationally deployed nuclear warheads , but it would maintain non-deployed warheads stored as a responsive force that could be added to the deployed forces.

President Barack Obama – whose administration started in 2009 – has highlighted in Prague in April 2009 his desire for a world free of nuclear weapons. He said that he would eliminate the Cold War thinking and reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the U.S. national security strategy and restart negotiations with Russia for more verifiable reductions in the nuclear arsenals of the two states. In April 2010, the Obama administration completed its Nuclear Posture Review, which defined steps to reduce the role and the number of U.S. nuclear weapons and emphasized that the fundamental role of U.S. nuclear forces was to deter nuclear attacks against the U.S. and its allies and partners. Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which required verifiable reductions of U.S. and Russian deployed strategic warheads. However, the signing of the New START was accompanied by a multibillion commitment of new resources for research, development and maintenance of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. The Obama administration also saw that missile defenses would be fundamental to ensure U.S. security.

The aim of this article (Dissuasão, redução de armas nucleares e defesas antimísseis nos governos Bush e Obama) is to analyze the positions of Bush and Obama administrations regarding deterrence, the reduction of nuclear weapons and missile defenses. I argue that , in spite of differences in the ways of implementation of decisions, both administrations reaffirmed the fundamental role of nuclear weapons for deterrence, committed themselves to the reduction of nuclear weapons accompanied by initiatives to modernize them and recognized the importance of missile defenses in the protection of the U.S. and its allies. Such perspectives are related to the ongoing need to expand the flexibility to deal with contemporary threats and maintain diverse options for addressing these challenges.

Leia o artigo:

JESUS, Diego Santos Vieira de. Dissuasão, redução de armas nucleares e defesas antimísseis nos governos Bush e Obama. Rev. bras. polít. int. [online]. 2013, vol.56, n.2 [cited 2014-02-24], pp. 79-93 . Available from: <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-73292013000200005&lng=en&nrm=iso&gt;. ISSN 0034-7329. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0034-73292013000200005.