The Toronto Star's Richard Gwynn tears a strip off the U.S.'s nuclear weapons policy.

An excerpt from the May 10 column:

"Overkill" (an unfortunate word in this context) is the best way to describe U.S. nuclear policy. It's a larger version of the anti-missile program. Today, a decade-and-a-half after the end of the Cold War and therefore after the end of any serious nuclear threat to its territory and people, the U.S. has 5,300 "operationally deployed" nuclear weapons.

To understand the scale of that armoury, Britain, France and China, all well-established nuclear powers, each have between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads. Russia does have a lot more. But most of them are rusting and antiquated.

American apologists keep saying that under a deal (in 2001) with Russia, the U.S. will reduce its warheads to around 2,000. Except that the deactivated warheads won't be scrapped but will be put into a "responsive reserve," from which they can be retrieved quickly if necessary.

The objective — as with the missile-defence system — isn't arms reduction or arms control or nuclear security. It's nuclear supremacy, absolute and unchallengeable.

As part of this continued drive for supremacy, the U.S. has announced it will not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and, although no decision to test has yet been made, Washington has ordered the national nuclear laboratories to start research on new atomic weapons.

While all this is going on, the U.S. is trying to convince Iran and North Korea to halt their minuscule nuclear programs. If Washington was out, instead, to provoke these two nations into developing nuclear weapons, it is impossible to imagine policies and practices that would more certainly produce that result. It's all madness. But clever, cynical, Machiavellian madness.

To justify its own nuclear program, from the anti-missile system to the dismissal of international controls, Washington needs a threat. Iran and North Korea, thus, are doing exactly what Washington wants them to do. And they are doing it because Washington is provoking them into doing it.