Project 2025 Could Kill Us All
Trump and the Heritage Foundation have a plan for nuclear war.
Project 2025 is more than an assault on reproductive rights and American Democracy. It wants to put America’s nuclear weapons complex on “a wartime footing.” I detail the plans to ramp up the production and deployment of nuclear weapons in a new piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
As readers of this newsletter know, I think that President Joe Biden has a terrible nuclear policy. He has ramped up the production of new nuclear weapons, failed to rejoin the deal that shrank and contained Iran’s program, failed to roll back North Korea’s nuclear programs and wants to give Saudi Arabia the technology for enriching uranium.
Trump’s policies would be much worse.
Trump would put nuclear weapons programs on steroids, trash what remains of the global arms control regime, and likely trigger new nuclear weapons programs in more other nations than we have seen at any time since the early 1960s.
How do we know? They wrote it all down.
Trump’s plan is contained in the conservative manifesto written as part of Project 2025, a consortium of over 100 far-right groups organized by the Heritage Foundation. The foundation wrote a similar “Mandate for Leadership” in 1980. It served as the guide for Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution. Forty-four years later, they are at it again. But this time, it is not just policy recommendations. It is a detailed plan for overthrowing nearly every department and agency in the government, replacing knowledgeable nonpartisan experts with Trump loyalists.
As a Trump victory has grown increasingly likely, more attention has been focused on this plan. John Oliver has done perhaps the best, concise analysis. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this piece and watch it now.
The project is a direct assault on American Democracy. But it gets worse. Buried in the chapter of how these right-wing zealots would subvert the Department of Defense is their plan to trash all remaining arms control and nuclear risk reduction agreements and ramp up production and deployment of new nuclear weapons. The Heritage Foundation separately details the exact steps Trump should take to put America’s nuclear weapons complex on “a wartime footing.”
Here are brief excerpts from my detailed analysis of their terrifying plans.
The Project 2025 coalition members are staffed by over 200 former officials of the first Trump administration. These sophisticated Trump-movement MAGA operatives now know how to work the levers of government and have learned from what they see as their main mistake during Trump’s first term: leaving the “deep state” intact. These conservatives proudly served Donald Trump through his administration and attempted insurrection. They are now ready to help him complete the job and their plan is here for everyone willing to see.
“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” writes Paul Dans, a former chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration and now the director of Project 2025, in his foreword to the report. Russ Vought, the chief of staff of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now the president of the conservative think tank Center for Renewing America, agrees: “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Vought vows to be “ready on Day One of the next transition,” adding, “Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”
In the nuclear realm, “seizing control” would mean implementing the most dramatic build up of nuclear weapons since the start of the Reagan administration, some four decades ago. If this hawkish political coalition gets its way in November, the scope, pace, and cost of US nuclear weapons programs would increase all at once. Their plan, which seeks to significantly increase budgets and deployments of nuclear weapons and related programs and destroy the remaining arms control agreements, would dramatically increase the risks of nuclear confrontation as a result.
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Increasing the US arsenal at the scale recommended by the Project 2025 would likely compel rival nations—including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—to increase their defense budgets, warfighting plans, and nuclear weapons developments and deployments to match what they will see as an increasing threat from the United States. Allied nations will also be caught up in the competition, fueling an already existing nuclear arms race: Japan, South Korea, and even Germany could be pushed over the nuclear line.
This would be the unintended consequence of an unleashed nuclear modernization. While each nuclear-armed state sees its programs as defensive, their adversaries see them as offensive programs striving for a military advantage. Each move engenders a countermove; each nation believes it is responding to the other. That’s how the security dilemma has spiraled since World War II. But the Project 2025’s recommendations go one step further: They are based on the belief that the United States would win any arms contest through superior technology, resources, and political will.
In 2019, former President Trump’s arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea said: “We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will.”
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Taken together, the policies and programs advocated by the Project 2025’s self-proclaimed “mandate for leadership” would push the United States onto the precipice of an expensive, dangerous, and destabilizing nuclear confrontation—something not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War.
I hope you have time to read the whole article. I am grateful that the Bulletin editors granted me the space to explore Trump’s apocalyptic designs.
I was a member of a group that provided analysis to the Navy regarding deterrence, force posture and arms control issues. When you are part of that world it is easy to get caught up in the numbers and forget the big picture. In that capacity I was asked to do a study on the evolution of the Navy's strategic forces. It was then that I discovered how much politics, budgets, inter service rivalries, etc drove the process. Actual rational strategic needs were an afterthought. At that point I left that group and spent the rest of my career developing intelligence systems.
As far as I can see I don't think much has changed. Apparently the government has developed an integrated conventional/strategic strategy which involves low yield nuclear weapons to provide "in kind" responses as part of flexible employment schemes. In my opinion this makes things worse, not better.
Keep up the good flight!
Why do the number of nuclear weapons matter at this point?
What's the difference between 1,000 Russian nukes falling on America and 10,000 Russian nukes falling on America? Fifty nukes hitting our largest cities would probably be enough to crash the food distribution system, leading to mass starvation, and social and political chaos. Just taking out our ports might be enough to crash the economy and bring on the chaos.
We are now in yet another presidential election season where nuclear weapons will barely be mentioned. Reason, facts and expert articles have proven themselves completely worthless on this topic. The only way to have any influence is not with words, but with leverage. As example...
About a year ago I had the opportunity to have a series of exchanges with a prominent scientist, a former leader of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We were discussing an open letter that about a thousand scientists had signed warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Of course this letter had no effect whatsoever, as anyone could have predicted.
And so I suggested that the science community APPLY LEVERAGE by going out on strike for some period of time. He immediately replied that this would never happen. And he was right. He was right. Not going to happen. They have the power. But they won't use it.
One of the key problems we face is that the elite class in general, and nuclear weapons experts in particular, are stuck in 20th century thinking. They keep saying and doing the same things over and over that have never worked for 75 years. Their real priority is not nuclear weapons, but their careers as experts. And that makes it impossible for them to speak the simple truth, that nothing they've ever suggested has made us any safer.
If there is a solution, it won't come from the expert community, but in the form of the next nuclear weapons detonation. If we're lucky that will be a limited event that is large enough to wake us up while being small enough to not prevent learning and change. If we're unlucky the turning point will be The Big One.
Nuclear weapons are a revolutionary technology which require a revolutionary response. We're never going to see a revolutionary response from those who have found a comfortable place within the elite class status quo.