Former President Ronald Reagan entered office known as a fire-breathing hawk. He left office having signed major agreements to limit nuclear arms. President Donald Trump wants to follow suit, but his policies could complicate that goal.
Trump on Thursday said he “wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China,” said The Associated Press. The world already possesses enough atomic weapons to “destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” the president said to reporters. Money spent to build and maintain those deadly stockpiles could be better used on efforts that are “actually, hopefully much more productive,” he said. The ultimate goal is for all three nuclear powers to eventually cut their defense budgets in half.
But some observers believe Trump’s approach could actually lead to “ever more leaders wielding ever more nukes,” said Andreas Kluth at Bloomberg. During the Cold War, the United States extended its “nuclear umbrella” over Western Europe, Japan and South Korea in part to discourage them from developing their own nuclear arsenals. That’s why American policy has been to “reassure allies that the U.S. had their backs.” Trump has “cast doubt” on that commitment, Kluth said. And “that message is disastrous” for nuclear strategy.
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‘$50 billion a year on nuclear forces’
Trump seems to envision a world in which the “Ukraine war is over, Vladimir Putin is pacified and the threat of nuclear war recedes,” said The Telegraph. It will be tough to end those wars and to bring China on board for disarmament talks, but Trump “appears confident he can make deals” with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — even though he failed in his first term to head off North Korea’s nuclear program. Trump appears primarily interested in cutbacks due to costs. “The U.S. is spending around $50 billion per year on its nuclear forces.”
If Trump wants to denuclearize, then “let’s help him,” said William Hartung at Responsible Security. The president’s talk of reducing nuclear arms suggests a “market for such a policy among members of his political base.” That means anti-nuclear activists have an opportunity to make the case that it is “far more dangerous to spend obscene amounts of money building a new generation of nuclear weapons” than it is to reduce the stockpiles of arms.
The cost of the ‘nuclear umbrella’
There are skeptics. Trump’s record and tendency to fiery rhetoric could “prove fatal to nuclear nonproliferation,” said Akshai Vikram at Just Security. The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons helped restrain the growth of those weapons in the world, but that required “bipartisan vigilance” in support of the nuclear umbrella. Trump — a “skeptic” of U.S. alliances — has “never believed the nuclear umbrella is worth the costs.” If he withdraws the U.S. from defending places like Europe and South Korea, those countries “will conclude that they need their own nuclear deterrents.”
One factor in all this is Trump’s mass firing of federal employees. “Mass terminations” swept through the National Nuclear Security Administration this week, said NPR. The agency is responsible for “upgrading America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, combating nuclear terrorism and preventing proliferation around the world.” It lost 300 of its 1,800 staffers.
