National Security: Aiming at a world where nuclear weapons are obsolete, the administration's nuclear posture review leaves a world without American nuclear weapons and the backbone to use them.

After his stunning bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto lamented that all that had been accomplished was to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Under policies announced by the Obama administration, a devastating chemical or biological attack on this country might merely awaken our very own Hamlet and fill him with a terrible sense of angst.

We have said before that rather than strive for a world without nuclear weapons, we should strive for a world without enemies willing to use them against us. Our retaliatory power should be unquestioned, as should be our willingness to use it. President Reagan called this proven and successful policy peace through strength. It has been replaced by a hair-splitting policy of nuance.

The U.S. is now promising not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attack America with biological or chemical weapons or launch a paralyzing cyberattack.

This is good news for our enemies to know — they can wipe out much of New York City, but as long as their signature is on that piece of paper, their capital is safe from becoming a pile of irradiated rubble. We are not making this up.

In this nuclear posture, which can best be described as slouching in a recliner, we renounce the development of any new nuclear weapons, thus ensuring the aging of our nuclear deterrent into obsolescence and irrelevance.

And we'll be getting rid of some old ones — the long-range, nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missile, for example.

Our arsenal is to shrink by thousands of nuclear weapons, and we'll restrict the instances in which their use is an option. Worse yet, we'll tell our enemies when and if we will use them, eliminating the ambiguity that has helped keep us safe. Under President George W. Bush, our posture reserved the right to use nuclear weapons "to deter a wide range of threats," including biological and chemical attack.

President Obama will sign a U.S.-Russian arms treaty in Prague on Thursday and host a nuclear security summit in Washington next week. The administration says the treaty will scale back the number of deployed long-range warheads by 30%. Obama pledges we will "reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy." Unfortunately, he will reduce our national security as well.

There used to be a policy called mutual assured destruction, or MAD, by which war among the superpowers would be deterred by the ability of each to survive and still devastate each other. This new policy is just plain mad, without the deterrence, making conflict more likelier.

President Kennedy once said, and rightly so, that only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt could we be certain beyond doubt that they would never be employed. Reagan won the Cold War and pushed the Evil Empire into the ash heap of history through a policy of peace through strength. He announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, built a 600-ship Navy and put Pershing missiles in Europe.

Our potential enemies have not stood still. As Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, points out, Moscow is on track toward upgrading 80% of its strategic forces. It routinely conducts underground, hydrodynamic tests that Obama considers impermissible under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty we religiously observe.

In his Prague speech last year, Obama spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," ignoring the fact that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure.

We'd prefer that the security of the American people be entrusted to an American military ready to respond with overwhelming force to any attack from any source, rather than pieces of parchment and the goodwill of our enemies.