Kelsey Hartigan, National Security Network's newest blogger, started off with a 'bang.' This blog is a well researched and well argued reply to the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which is still living in the Cold War era of "us vs them." Co-authoring with Heather Hurlburt, executive director of NSN, Kelsey unpacks the WSJ editorial, exposes its misinformation, and states the facts on US nuclear security needs.

Here's an excerpt from " Wall Street Journal Recycles Misstatements", written on January 5th, 2010:

The new START Treaty cutting US and Russian nuclear arsenals, set to be concluded later this month, enjoys broad, bipartisan support from national security experts in the US and from America’s friends and allies around the world – but you’d never know that by reading the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Its January 5 editorial, “A False Nuclear Start,” makes no fewer than four false assertions about the state of the US nuclear deterrent. Below, NSN marshals the work of bipartisan commissions and top nuclear experts to establish the facts:

* The US spends $30 billion per year to keep our nuclear deterrent safe, secure and reliable; the National Defense Act of 2010 commits to maintaining this funding and to modernizing the nuclear weapons complex – which manages the weapons. The Act does not require, as the Journal asserts, modernizing the weapons themselves. The Administration has pledged that the defense budget to be released next month will fund fully our nuclear labs, science and engineering base, and our nuclear stockpile.
* All of several recent bipartisan reports on the future of the US nuclear arsenal have concluded that the United States does not need new weapons or new nuclear capabilities.
* The new treaty will provide intrusive verification measures to monitor treaty limits; where surveillance of a specific Russian facility has recently been dropped, this was done with the prior agreement of the Bush Administration.
* The allies covered by our nuclear umbrella – Japan in particular – have expressed strong support, publicly and privately, for the treaty and for nuclear arms reductions.

The full blog post can be found here: http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2010/01/nsn-gets-new-blogger-wall-street...

Or at the Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-hurlburt/wall-street-journal-on-nu_b_412580.html