War Room
Will Trump come to his senses in time to avert an arms race and a nuclear war?
By Bruce Blair
February 11, 2017
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier, warned in an extraordinary article late last month that the “increasingly belligerent” tone of geopolitical debates looked to him “as if the world is preparing for war.” He urged the United Nations Security Council to “adopt a resolution stating that nuclear war is unacceptable and must never be fought.”
To almost everyone, this call from a far-sighted leader may seem self-evident, but what about President Donald Trump?
Trump has suggested he is willing to launch a new nuclear arms race, despite the costs and the risks. In his phone call with Vladimir Putin last month, Trump reportedly rebuffed the Russian president’s apparent offer to extend the New START agreement that otherwise expires in 2021. This extension was a key aim of President Barack Obama, whose administration negotiated the arms deal. It would enable the United States to continue to closely monitor Russia’s strategic nuclear deployments and prevent Russia from uploading huge numbers of warheads onto those forces. Without the extension, the U.S. intelligence community would need to spend billions of additional dollars to monitor Russia. And the uncertainty and unpredictability of each side’s deployments would likely spark a costly nuclear arms race and increase the instability of a nuclear crisis and the likelihood of nuclear conflict.
After reportedly checking with his advisers to learn what treaty Putin was talking about (the White House says he was asking for an opinion), Trump apparently told the Russian leader the entire agreement was just another bad deal signed by his predecessor, even though its provisions impose identical obligations on both sides, and even though it was supported by the U.S. Senate and all the key national security players, including the U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Instead of seizing upon a good offer (as well as an offer to convene talks on a range of other nuclear issues, including strategic stability, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the call) that would strengthen U.S. national security, Trump signaled a willingness to embark on an expensive, pointless new arms race that he boasts the United States would win.
This is a foolish, dangerous delusion. Trump seems to believe he can bend opponents to his will. And, although he evidently knows little about nuclear weapons, he seems to embrace the Dr. Strangelove view that they are for war-fighting and war-winning. During the presidential campaign, for instance, he refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons to fight the Islamic State, despite the absurdity of wielding them against a lightly armed terrorist group. Against a heavily armed nuclear state like Russia or China, the notion of nuclear war-fighting is beyond absurd. Once nuclear weapons are unleashed, a conflict would almost certainly escalate to all-out proportions and kill hundreds of millions of people.
Will Trump come to understand his folly in time to avert an arms race, a nuclear crisis and a nuclear war? His mindset recalls President Ronald Reagan, who also entered the White House intent on launching a nuclear buildup and believing that a nuclear war could be fought and won. Soon after taking office, Reagan signed a presidential directive calling upon the nuclear establishment to plan and prepare for prevailing in a nuclear conflict lasting as long as half a year.
Reagan intended to convince the Soviets that they would lose a nuclear war and therefore they had better not start one, but his aggressive rhetoric and nuclear build-up had the unintended effect of provoking the Soviets. The president was startled to learn from top secret reports based on intelligence from a KGB spy working for the British that the Soviet leadership so feared a U.S. nuclear first strike that it was seriously preparing to pre-emptively strike the United States. He also faced massive public pressure for a freeze on the arms race. Reagan quickly backpedaled. By the start of his second term, he sought arms-control talks with the Soviets and agreed with Gorbachev on the goal of banning nuclear weapons.
By then, Reagan and Gorbachev understood that the notion that a nuclear war can be fought and won is the height of self-delusion. The whole point of nuclear weapons, rather, is to deter their use. Believing a nuclear war can yield victory only creates incentives to strike first while inviting a breakdown of command and control and the abandonment of all restraint.
This still holds today. In the case of wars with Russia or China, escalation culminating in a civilization-ending nuclear exchange seems the most plausible outcome. Practically every U.S. nuclear force exercise involving a Russia scenario ends exactly this way—in a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills tens of millions of civilians.
Nuclear crises involving coercion and threats meant to subdue an adversary are likewise fraught. Bullying the other side in a nuclear confrontation might succeed, but it just as easily could provoke escalation to the brink of war and possibly beyond. The definitive study of the effectiveness of nuclear blackmail during the Cold War finds it had mixed results, even when the United States enjoyed overwhelming nuclear superiority. In some cases, the United States forced the Soviet Union or China to back down, but in others the threats were counter-productive. Hubris in this arena today, too, threatens to fuel escalation and yield a nuclear war instead of a diplomatic victory.
By the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Soviet Union had learned that arms races are expensive and dangerous. Far better to stave them off through mutual agreements based on equal security. Thousands of nuclear weapons on each side have been disarmed and dismantled since the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty 30 years ago.
Trump needs a crash course on the probable consequences of a nuclear exchange with our nuclear rivals, especially Russia because of its vast arsenal. His education should include a thorough repudiation of the delusion of U.S. nuclear primacy. No matter what armchair strategists may claim, U.S. strategic nuclear forces and missile defenses are not capable of blocking Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike. Not by a long shot.
Even if the United States could surreptitiously raise its nuclear readiness to a war footing and launch a surprise, full-scale nuclear strike that caught Russia flat-footed, the U.S. would suffer massive casualties. At least 145 Russian warheads could be delivered by surviving Russian mobile nuclear missiles alone, according to a new study by Global Zero. If those missiles were allocated one to every American city with a population above 172,000, nearly 150 cities would be utterly destroyed in retaliation. Twenty-two million people would die.
Trump’s hometown would suffer the most. Nearly 2 million people would be killed by a single nuclear detonation above Times Square in New York City. His newly adopted home of Washington, D.C., would suffer more than half a million fatalities.
After Trump received the nuclear codes, he described the experience as “very sobering” and “a very, very scary thing.” He could offer proof by announcing, together with Putin, that “nuclear war is unacceptable and must never be fought.”
Bruce G. Blair is a nuclear security expert and a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton and the co-founder of Global Zero.
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