Greeks Attack Merkel Government as Nazi Regime

At London's Daily Mail, "Furious Greeks lampoon German 'overlords' as Nazis with picture of Merkel dressed as an SS guard."

Greeks angry at the fate of the euro are comparing the German government with the Nazis who occupied the country in the Second World War.

Newspaper cartoons have presented modern-day German officials dressed in Nazi uniform, and a street poster depicts Chancellor Angela Merkel dressed as an officer in Hitler’s regime accompanied with the words: ‘Public nuisance.’

Greeks are furious at the deal, even though it means the banks will write off 50 per cent of the country’s debt and Socialist prime minister George Papandreou said Greece had ‘avoided a mortal national danger’.

Opposition parties blasted the landmark agreement, with conservatives warning it condemned the country to ‘nine more years of collapse and poverty’.

But it is the fury of ordinary Greeks which is raising eyebrows.

Greek government officials who agreed to the belt-tightening moves have been portrayed in cartoons giving the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil’ salute.

And German visitors flocking to ancient tourist sites are being met with a hostile welcome from some Greeks.

Berlin’s interference has revived historical enmities and evoked comparisons to the massive destruction of Greece at the hands of Hitler’s Germany more than 65 years ago.

That's pretty cheap.

Of course, Greece is the freeloader of Europe, so naturally they'd attack the powerful Germans as "Nazis."

World War II: The Allied Invasion of Europe

A phenomenal photo-essay, from Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic.

The Invasion of Poland, September 1, 1939

I posted on this last September:

Nagasaki 66th Anniversary of Atomic Bombing

August 6th snuck up on me before I could get one of my annual atomic bombing essays posted, so here's a little something for Nagasaki: At WaPo, "Nagasaki remembers bombing, US sends first representative to memorial." And at New York Times, "Aug. 9, 1945 | U.S. Drops Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki, Japan."

67th Anniversary of D-Day

At Long Island Press, "D-Day Marks its 67th Anniversary." And Weasel Zippers, "Today Is The 67th Anniversary of D-Day…"

On Memorial Day I was trolling around for videos and ended up watching some long clips from "Saving Private Ryan" on YouTube. After a few minutes I checked over at my Facebook page and Marooned in Marin had linked the video. Anyway, here's the first few minutes. It's still my favorite movie:

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Falls on May 1st this year, the same day as international workers' solidarity day. There's some profound puzzle in that coincidence, but I'll unravel it later. Jeff Jacoby, of the Boston Globe, lost family members in the Holocaust, and he writes: "A demon gone, but evil remains":

The Germans slaughtered 1.3 million human beings in Auschwitz, of whom 1.1 million were Jews. Six of those Jews were my father’s parents, David and Leah Jakubovic, and their children Franceska, Zoltan, Yrvin, and Alice. Gassed to death in 1944, they represent 1 one-millionth — 0.000001 — of the 6 million European Jews annihilated in the Holocaust.

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, it hardly needs to be said that mass murder didn’t end with the defeat of the Third Reich. In the decades since 1945, innocent men, women, and children beyond number have been massacred — in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in the Soviet gulag and North Korean slave camps, in Rwanda and Bosnia, Sudan and Syria, Congo and Uganda. Yet even in an epoch that has shattered every record for bloodiness and barbarity, the Holocaust is unique. What sets it apart from other campaigns of butchery is not its body count or its brutality or its genocidal nature. Nor is it the rapidity with which it was carried out, or the international indifference against which it unfolded.

The destruction of European Jewry stands alone because it was not a means to any end. The “Final Solution’’ was an end in itself. Jews were not murdered by the millions in the context of a struggle for power or land or wealth. There was no political or economic rationale for wiping out the Jews; they had nothing the Nazis coveted, and Germany gained nothing by their deaths. There was only the maniacal ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism — the determination to track down and kill anyone born of Jewish ancestry. “It was precisely this — the fact of being born — that was the mortal sin, to be punished by death,’’ the historian Yehuda Bauer has observed. “That had never happened at any time — or anywhere — before.’’

RTWT. No need to guess where today's evil resides.

WWII Bombers Over Arizona Landscape

Via Theo Spark:

Who Was Worse, Hitler or Stalin?

At New York Review, "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?":

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

Ultimately, folks'll have to assess this essay themselves, given the nature of the discussion. The author, Timothy Snyder, isn't as clear as he should be, given that he's claiming the Nazis killed more than the Soviets. But the basic gist is that the Soviet numbers have been revised downward. And does it matter at this point, despite the discussion of the marginal enormity of one more single death out of the 100s of thousands or even millions? Only God knows the suffering of each of the families that lost loved ones. It becomes a metaphysical thing, at some point. And despite the author's numerical exegesis, I'm not convinced that Stalin's modernization planning and ruthless political liquidation programs are of the same kind of totalitarianism that resulted in the Holocaust. It's all depressing, and if folks recall Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, the permissive causes (especially anti-Semitism) were found all across Europe following the turn of the 20th century. Beyond this, I'm leaving it to the experts. At least in reflecting on these things, the last thing that comes to mind is the GOP's budget balancing programs today. Progressive Democrats are hoisting signs emblazoned with STALIN, HITLER, WALKER. And the effect --- beyond sheer stupidity --- is simply to illustrate how fleeting is the left's legitimacy and its grip on the social welfare state in early-21st century America.

DoubleTapper Visits Dachau

A photo-essay: "Memorial Day for Holocaust Victims."

Ending the War to End All Wars

An essay from Margaret MacMillan, at New York Times:

NOT many people noticed at the time, but World War I ended this year. Well, in a sense it did: on Oct. 3, Germany finally paid off the interest on bonds that had been taken out by the shaky Weimar government in an effort to pay the war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.

While the amount, less than $100 million, was trivial by today’s standards, the payment brought to a close one of the most poisonous chapters of the 20th century. It also, unfortunately, brought back to life an insidious historical myth: that the reparations and other treaty measures were so odious that they made Adolf Hitler’s rise and World War II inevitable.

In truth, the reparations, as the name suggests, were not intended as a punishment. They were meant to repair the damage done, mainly to Belgium and France, by the German invasion and subsequent four years of fighting. They would also help the Allies pay off huge loans they had taken to finance the war, mainly from the United States. At the Paris peace talks of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was very clear that there should be no punitive fines on the losers, only legitimate costs. The other major statesmen in Paris, Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, reluctantly agreed, and Germany equally reluctantly signed the treaty.

In Weimar Germany, a society deeply divided by class and politics, hatred of the “dictated peace” was widespread, and there was no shame in trying to escape its provisions. The final sum for reparations was not mentioned in the treaty — itself a humiliation in German eyes — but was eventually set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (about $442 billion in today’s terms). The fact is that Germany could have managed to pay, but for political reasons chose not to.

Some might recall that I wrote about this at the time: "Germany Pays Off Reparations Imposed at Versailles — 92 Years Later!"

69th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Attack

The main story's at USA Today, "For a Few, Pearl Harbor Still a Vivid Memory."

Jim Morgan was sleeping a little late on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.
His mother, Beryl, had tried to wake him up at about 7:30, but the 9-year-old, whose family lived at the Navy base at Pearl Harbor, didn't stir until she came back about 25 minutes later.

He got up just in time to witness history out his bedroom window.

"I said, 'Look, Ma! There's a fire at the submarine base.' "

At that same moment, Russell Meyne was sitting down to a plate of pancakes, bacon and eggs in the mess hall at Pearl Harbor's Hickam Air Base, 2 miles away. He was hoping to revitalize himself after a night of drinking beer with his buddies, celebrating their selection to a group that would be heading to the mainland for flight training.

Suddenly, everything changed.

"The table almost bounced up and down, and all the pots and pans in the kitchen started falling on the floor," said Meyne, an Army private at the time, now 91 and treasurer of the South Carolina branch of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

"Then the bombing got really exciting."

Meyne and Morgan are among a dwindling number of people who can talk firsthand about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. As the 69th anniversary is marked today, it coincides with a week-long meeting of the national Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

The group's numbers have dropped so low, the possibility of shuttering it was discussed at the Honolulu convention, which runs through Friday. Association President Art Herriford on Monday said about 100 members decided against disbanding. Instead, the association will have four district directors around the country instead of eight.

Out of 60,000 military personnel on the island during the attack, the association estimates only about 3,000 survivors still participate in chapters scattered across the country.

"This convention is all-important for the Pearl Harbor survivors," U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Jim Donis, 91, of Palm Desert, Calif., said before Monday's meeting. "This is going to be the first time we talk about when we want to shut down the national organization."

And also earlier at LAT:

The view from the San Diego-bound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner on Saturday was Americana 2010. Morning garage sales, youth soccer games, joggers on the beach and surfers in the ocean all flicked past at 80 mph.

Inside it was pure 1941, right down to the 1940s-era first-class lounge car, vintage Navy blue uniforms, Yank magazines and packages of Clove chewing gum.

Sixty-nine years after the attack on Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, veterans and their families, railroad buffs and World War II reenactors in period dress took to the rails Saturday to mark Tuesday's anniversary.

For passengers on the Pearl Harbor Day Troop Train ride — an annual event organized by a pair of railroad enthusiasts for the last eight years — it was a chance to hear firsthand accounts of the war from the people who fought it.

RTWT.

Also at LAT, "Two Neighbors, Both Pearl Harbor Survivors, Are Decades-Old Friends."

Heritage of the Great War

An interesting historical collection, including what's said to be some of the very first color pictures from World War I. This one's titled, "Verdun - Synonym for Inhumanity":

French picture made in 1916 in a trench near Verdun, Northern France.



The Battle of Verdun was the longest and one of the bloodiest engagements of World War I. Two million men were engaged. The Germans began the battle on February 21, 1916. In December of that year the French had regained most of the ground lost.



The Germans intended a battle of attrition in which they hoped to bleed the French army white. In the end they sustained almost as many casualties as the French: an estimated 328,000 to the French 348,000. The real figures are unknown.

Nowadays Verdun stands for everything that is cruel and savage in warfare. Soldiers on both sides lost their sense of humanity.

Actually, the Holocaust is probably a more important example of man's inhumanity. Verdun, as horrible as it was, illustrates the folly of fighting mass 20th century industrial warfare using battlefield tactics of the 19th century. The First World War was mechanized trench warfare for the calvary ethos. Offensive military doctrines were made instantly obsolete by the advantages of machine gun cover. Entire generations of fighting men were wiped out. But it wasn't the war to end all wars. The origins of war are found in the structure of the system and in the hearts of men, unfortunately. Nations will continue to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best, or lest they fall by the wayside.



HAT TIP: Blazing Catfur, "Killed by Mustard Gas..."



BONUS: "French Army in the Great War."

Remembrance Sunday Pictures

At London's Telegraph: "In pictures: The Queen leads tributes to Britain's war dead on Remembrance Sunday."

Have You Read it? The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

Don't neglect your history.

I recommend, especially in these troubled times, Saul Friedlander's, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Vol 2).

I wrote previously about the book here.

Sixteen Spitfires at Duxford Battle of Britain Airshow

The sound of victory, via Theo Spark:

This Day in History: The Invasion of Poland, September 1, 1939

We're dealing with international history in the first few weeks of my World Politics course (theory too, but the history's also a foundation for the class). And I thought about September 1st today, while discussing the German challenge to international security, 1919-1939. In any case, there's a report at Digital Journal, "Ceremonies Mark Invasion of Poland and Outbreak of WWII." And check Wikipedia for the historical entry there.

Thoughts on 'A Film Unfinished'

I make it a point to see most World War II films at the theaters. And I have a special interest in the Holocaust. As longtime readers may recall, my dissertation focused on the problem of "under-balancing" against the Nazi threat in Europe during the interwar period. And while not a subject of my research, the fate of the Jews has always animated my thinking on this topic, and of course in international politics more generally. It's pretty much the case that each new film dealing with WWII and the Holocaust is deeply moving (life-affirming and life-changing), and sometimes it seems each one improves on those before it in some ways. Commercial successes "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" showcased Steven Spielberg's masterwork on the war and Shoah. "The Pianist" was powerful in different ways, based on the life of Warsaw Ghetto survivor Władysław Szpilman --- although I get a creepy feeling seeing films directed by Roman Polanski, so while great, there's just something still not quite perfect about it. "Downfall" --- the German production on the last days of Hitler's Bunker --- was also different (being a German film, for one thing) and probably is one of the greatest war movies of recent years. There might be a few others more forgettable, and hence I'm forgetting them in this list. (And I'm deliberately omitting more commercial movies like Tom Cruise's recent "Valkyrie," which I thought excellent but in a different category from those highlighted here; and the more artsy "Life is Beautiful," both wonderful and comparable to those discussed above, is sometimes too fantastic and doesn't rank as one of the greatest for me).



Considering all of that, I'm sure Director Yael Hersonski's "A Film Unfinished" is the best Holocaust movie I've ever seen.

I've read all the news stories on the film highlighed at the homepage. Not to rehash, the key to the movie is the set of four reels of German propaganda footage that have never been put together for a single production. While widely seen in the Jewish film community, only snippets have been used in documentaries over time. Ms. Hersonski, a 34 year-old Israeli filmmaker, had worried that "there would be no Holocaust survivors left to bear witness to the atrocities they once experienced," so she saw in this recently discovered material the opportunity to make an existential commentary on the Jews and memory, the science of documentary filmmaking, and the aims of Nazi propaganda.

There is some mystery as to what exactly the Nazi propagandists were planning with the footage. A great deal of staging --- especially scenes of well-to-do Jews contrasted and combined with the poor and ragged --- was used most likely to make the case for a decadent, uncaring class of Jews indifferent to the death and dying of those with less. These families didn't in fact seem "rich" to me. They appeared the way I would expect Jewish people to live in 20th-century industrialized Poland. Perhaps there were some luxuries of furniture and style and cuisine, but these appeared not so socially exorbitant in isolation from the horrors of was happening without. In fact, perhaps it will take more viewings, but for me it's the 100 percent genuine documentation of man's inhumanity to man that is central to the experience of "A Film Unfinished." One word summed up the first half of the movie: starvation. The raw, searing clips of emaciated people, walking corpses many of them, is authentic by definition in this picture, and the viewer feels as though she's let in on a secret, since much of this kind of documentary record was destroyed. There is little physical violence perpertrated against the Jews by the Nazis seen here. It's the systematic killing by starvation that shocks the soul. Inhabitants of the ghetto received a ration of 186 calories a day. It was not known at first that the ghetto's population was to be deported to Treblinka. But we see dead bodies strewn along the sidewalks, and the most emotion generated by the film comes from the interviews with five Warsaw Ghetto survivors who agreed to watch the Nazi footage. This is astonishing filmmaking. And there's more to it, but I'll hold off on commenting on the final reel, which concludes the film.



Perhaps another Holocaust movie will come along and I'll say once again, "this is the best one I've ever seen." I don't know. I simply know that for me --- and for what I've experienced in my life, from childhood to my career --- it's been this question of Jewish 20th-century existentialism that has compelled a moral understanding of life and politics. Perhaps there are even bigger problems to humanity than the Holocaust. I think Yael Hersonski wants those who see this movie to remember and then apply their experience to improving the goodness of the world. But because there are so many things that are unique to this history, and because Americans are implicated in it in so many ways, I doubt that I'll lose my fascination with the topic any time soon.



RELATED: I posted the film's trailer previously here.

Review — 'A Film Unfinished'

From Kenneth Turan, at LAT:

Squeezing half a million Jews into the 3 square miles of the Warsaw Ghetto led to almost unimaginable poverty and desolation. The beggars in pathetic rags, the starving people dying on the streets, the sick and destitute living in squalor, these make the most powerful of impressions.

Just as disturbing are the original footage's numerous close-ups of ghetto residents, close-ups that are simply awful to look at. Living faces haunted by knowledge of a sure death, these are among the most purely despairing images ever put on screen.

As bad, if not worse, are scenes that almost beggar description. There is the horrible humiliation of forcing women to disrobe and then filming them, clearly terrified, using a mikvah, or ritual bath. And shots of the numberless corpses piled one on top of the other in the ghetto's massive cemetery leave one speechless with despondency.

The Nazis, obviously, were not interested in a film that emphasized Jewish suffering. The aim of "The Ghetto," as far as can be determined, was to contrast this pain with the alleged callous indifference of better-off Jews, to show, as the voice-over says, "the paradise the Jews lived in." Only, there were no better-off Jews, let alone a paradise, which is where the Nazi fakery and manipulation came in.

Outtakes show that key scenes were staged over and over again from multiple angles. As a voice-over reading from the journals of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the ghetto's Jewish Council, makes clear, the sequences we see of Jews putting on evening dress to go to Champagne banquets were completely fabricated. As a survivor of the ghetto laconically says on watching a dinner with flowers on the table, "We would have eaten the flowers."

See also, NYT, "An Israeli Finds New Meanings in a Nazi Film."

I posted the trailer previously. I'll have some comments on the film later today.

'A Film Unfinished'

Opens Friday in Los Angeles. I should be able to make it. And from LAT:

Four years ago, Yael Hersonski was struck by an unthinkable concept: In the foreseeable future, there would be no Holocaust survivors left to bear witness to the atrocities they once experienced. So the Israeli filmmaker set out to find the kind of unforgettable footage she might cinematically use to help keep this horrific chapter of history alive. What Hersonski uncovered, with an assist from producer Noemi Schory, was a 62-minute, 35-millimeter rough cut of a never-released 1942 Nazi propaganda film simply labeled "Das Ghetto."

The film, discovered by Schory in a Jerusalem Holocaust museum but first unearthed in an East German film archive in 1954, was particularly curious as it was apparently abandoned after it was shot without evidence of who was behind it, its exact purpose or why it was never completed. More remarkable was the fact that it even still existed, given that a reported 90% of film footage shot by the Nazis was destroyed at the end of World War II. But this one, lost and recovered several times through the decades, had already been examined in the years following the war, its footage thought to be a starkly real depiction of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by the Nazis in occupied Poland.

It was one of many such films produced by the Third Reich to promulgate its policies, help gain and maintain power, vilify the Jews and, in some segments, portray Jews seemingly living the high life under the Nazis' "compassionate" protection.

But what Hersonski came across as she watched four unfolding reels of emaciated captives, corpse-strewn streets and even scenes of the Jewish elite attending posh Champagne balls, was a staggering fifth reel of outtakes that had been discovered in 1998 by a British researcher. In those images could be seen entire scenes being reshot, cameramen in the background and signs of staging. It was proof that the film, while capturing some genuine suffering, was being manipulated by SS cameramen.

This soundtrack-free assemblage so inspired the director it would wind up as the centerpiece of her own unique and gripping Holocaust documentary, "A Film Unfinished," which opens in Los Angeles theaters Friday.

RTWT.

The film's official homepage is here.

The Nukes We Need

Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, previously at Foreign Affairs, "Preserving the American Deterrent":

The success of nuclear deterrence may turn out to be its own undoing. Nuclear weapons helped keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, preventing the bitter dispute from engulfing the continent in another catastrophic conflict. But after nearly 65 years without a major war or a nuclear attack, many prominent statesmen, scholars, and analysts have begun to take deterrence for granted. They are now calling for a major drawdown of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and a new commitment to pursue a world without these weapons.

Unfortunately, deterrence in the twenty-first century may be far more difficult for the United States than it was in the past, and having the right mix of nuclear capabilities to deal with the new challenges will be crucial. The United States leads a global network of alliances, a position that commits Washington to protecting countries all over the world. Many of its potential adversaries have acquired, or appear to be seeking, nuclear weapons. Unless the world's major disputes are resolved -- for example, on the Korean Peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and around the Persian Gulf -- or the U.S. military pulls back from these regions, the United States will sooner or later find itself embroiled in conventional wars with nuclear-armed adversaries.

Preventing escalation in those circumstances will be far more difficult than peacetime deterrence during the Cold War. In a conventional war, U.S. adversaries would have powerful incentives to brandish or use nuclear weapons because their lives, their families, and the survival of their regimes would be at stake. Therefore, as the United States considers the future of its nuclear arsenal, it should judge its force not against the relatively easy mission of peacetime deterrence but against the demanding mission of deterring escalation during a conventional conflict, when U.S. enemies are fighting for their lives.

Debating the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is critical now because the Obama administration has pledged to pursue steep cuts in the force and has launched a major review of U.S. nuclear policy. (The results will be reported to Congress in February 2010.) The administration's desire to shrink the U.S. arsenal is understandable. Although the force is only one-fourth the size it was when the Cold War ended, it still includes roughly 2,200 operational strategic warheads -- more than enough to retaliate against any conceivable nuclear attack. Furthermore, as we previously argued in these pages ("The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," March/April 2006 [1]), the current U.S. arsenal is vastly more capable than its Cold War predecessor, particularly in the area of "counterforce" -- the ability to destroy an adversary's nuclear weapons before they can be used.

Simply counting U.S. warheads or measuring Washington's counterforce capabilities will not, however, reveal what type of arsenal is needed for deterrence in the twenty-first century. The only way to determine that is to work through the grim logic of deterrence: to consider what actions will need to be deterred, what threats will need to be issued, and what capabilities will be needed to back up those threats.

The Obama administration is right that the United States can safely cut its nuclear arsenal, but it must pay careful attention to the capabilities it retains. During a war, if a desperate adversary were to use its nuclear force to try to coerce the United States -- for example, by threatening a U.S. ally or even by launching nuclear strikes against U.S. overseas bases -- an arsenal comprised solely of high-yield weapons would leave U.S. leaders with terrible retaliatory options. Destroying Pyongyang or Tehran in response to a limited strike would be vastly disproportionate, and doing so might trigger further nuclear attacks in return. A deterrent posture based on such a dubious threat would lack credibility.

Instead, a credible deterrent should give U.S. leaders a range of retaliatory options, including the ability to respond to nuclear attacks with either conventional or nuclear strikes, to retaliate with strikes against an enemy's nuclear forces rather than its cities, and to minimize casualties. The foundation for this flexible deterrent exists. The current U.S. arsenal includes a mix of accurate high- and low-yield warheads, offering a wide range of retaliatory options -- including the ability to launch precise, very low-casualty nuclear counterforce strikes. The United States must preserve that mix of capabilities -- especially the low-yield weapons -- as it cuts the size of its nuclear force.

More at the link.

VIDEO HAT TIP: William Jacobson.