Can We Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe during the Trump Administration?

The risks we face, the collapse of arms control and what we might do to reduce the nuclear dangers.

Part I of my new analysis published in the International Policy Journal of the Center for International Policy.

During the 80 years of the nuclear age, even with the best leadership, the world has avoided nuclear catastrophe by “sheer luck,” as the late Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara often said. The second election of Donald Trump as president introduces new risks into an already volatile mix of geopolitical rivalries, human fallibilities and rapid nuclear launch capabilities. This new reality requires new thinking.

First, we must re-orient ourselves. A new nuclear arms race has begun. Those favoring global stability and nuclear risk reductions are in strategic retreat. Our goals must be to minimize our losses and prevent the very worst from happening. With skill — and luck — we can do that and prepare policies for when we may be able to return to the policy offensive. Perhaps in two years, perhaps in four.

Second, the challenges are not in one or two areas, but across the board. Outdated doctrines, out-of-control budgets, and entrenched nuclear bureaucracies and unstable leaders are among them. We live in a period where global and domestic restraint mechanisms are disappearing, including the arms control regime painstakingly built by conservatives and liberals over the decades. New leadership in the Department of Defense is likely to be more ideological and less experienced than at any time in the nuclear age.

Third, the experts and advocates who have tried to shape and implement responsible nuclear policies in this century must confront our collective failure. There has not been a meaningful step to reduce nuclear dangers in a decade, since the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement - and even that was short-lived. The nuclear arms control and disarmament organizations and institutes are weak and growing weaker. There is little reason to expect this enfeebled civil society  to  have measurable impact in the future without a frank assessment of what has gone wrong, followed by serious reorganization and reorientation.

Fourth, we must face the unique nuclear risks Donald Trump presents. His plans for a massive nuclear build up, combined with his likely weakness in the face of Russian aggression and his ambivalence around the status of Taiwan, could encourage the acquisition or use of nuclear weapons by one or more countries. His withdrawal from American global leadership will undermine the credibility of the U.S. pledge to defend its allies with all its military resources, including nuclear weapons, encouraging these allies and others to develop their own nuclear arsenals. There remains the chance that a beleaguered, unstable Donald Trump could use nuclear weapons, acting on the many nuclear threats he made in his first term in office.

While all of these risks indicate the peril of Trump once again gaining control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal, they only compound the risk posed by the considerable funding  Congress has already appropriated for duplicative nuclear weapons.

The New Nuclear Arms Race

Even before the election of Trump, nuclear arms controls were undergoing an extinction event.

Every year, agreements that stood for decades as guardrails preventing nuclear war are weakened or killed. Every year, more organizations that have championed these agreements disappear. There is little prospect that anything can be done to reverse this trend in the near term. While it is possible that Trump could arrive at some new agreements (as he almost did with North Korea during his first term in office), it is more likely that he will appoint to key positions those opposed to any limits on U.S. nuclear forces, and those that will seek an expansion of nuclear arms. 

These sentiments are not new. The desire to build more and bigger bombs began even as scientists were developing the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. That experience, and the subsequent use of atomic bombs on Japan, also catalyzed urgent efforts to control and eliminate these weapons. Scientists from Los Alamos launched several groups still active today, warning  the public about the grave nuclear dangers, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists.  

Most organizations working to prevent nuclear war, however, trace their origins to the 1960s or 1980s. During these decades there were global events that stirred publics to action - and encouraged governments to more urgently pursue limitations on the most deadly weapons ever invented. 

Most prominently, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with its close escape from global thermonuclear war and spike in public fears, helped launch a wave of negotiations culminating in the 1968 NuclearNon-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the 1972 SALT treaty.  Similarly, the US-Soviet nuclear build ups in the early 1980s brought millions of people to the streets of Western capitals, creating political pressures that yielded the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, the START treaties of 1991 and 1993, and almost led to the elimination of all nuclear weapons at the 1987 Reykjavik Summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Michel Gorbachev.

Indeed, most of the agreements, treaties and technology controls limiting or eliminating nuclear weapons evolved during these periods. They are dying off today, however, like the trilobites that once dominated the planet but could not survive the steady acidification of the ocean in the Permian extinction, 300 million years ago.

The most recently endangered treaty is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which bans nuclear weapons in space. U.S. officials suspect that Russia is now developing precisely this capability. Deploying such a weapon would threaten hundreds of satellites in space and the 57-year old treaty. It would be just the latest loss in the web of agreements that make up the arms control regime. 

This is happening even though the arms control regime, although imperfect, works. Arms agreements have helped prevent nuclear war and dramatically reduced the nuclear arsenals that menaced the world throughout the twentieth century. Today, weapon stockpiles are down some 88 percent from their Cold War peaks. Whereas President John F. Kennedy feared that some 15 or 20 nations could acquire nuclear weapons, there are still just nine nuclear-armed nations in the world, even though dozens more have the ability to make these weapons.

The very success of arms control and disarmament stirred two dangerous beliefs: one was that the agreements were no longer needed; the other was that they had gone too far and the U.S. needed to rebuild its arsenal.

End of Part I

Next: The Arms Control Extinction Event

For the complete article, please visit the International Policy Journal at the Center for International Policy.