Costa Rica landslide

President Barack Obama is urging Russia to move decisively beyond the cold war paradigm by negotiating a new round of arms reductions that would slash the numbers of nuclear weapons deployed by the US and Russia by one-third. It's a bold proposal that builds on a lot of historical success in the field of arms control. But it's not likely to be met with much enthusiasm in Moscow, where President Vladimir Putin has made anti-Americanism a central theme of his third presidential term, and the Russian military is extremely dubious about any further cuts in their already-overstretched nuclear deterrent.
 
Why is Obama proposing this idea now?
 
He's pitching it as part of the Global Nuclear Zero, a grand scheme supported by Mr. Obama and about 300 other world leaders to promote policies that will decrease and eventually eliminate atomic weapons from the Earth.