ABSTRACT
Barack Obama entered office with very different ideas about nuclear weapons, nuclear security and nuclear strategy than the outgoing Bush Administration. As part of his wider vision of ‘change’, Obama proposed re-igniting the international movement for nuclear disarmament, reducing the importance of nuclear weapons for US security, placing a new nuclear arms’ control deal with Russia at the top of his agenda, addressing the risks of nuclear security and nuclear terrorism, and shifting US nuclear thinking away from ‘primacy’ towards ‘sufficiency’. Under Obama’s leadership, it was widely believed that the US nuclear structure would undergo something of a sea-change, and that nuclear policy would be rationalised and stabilised after a period of flux and disruption driven by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
