Forward to the past: Trump’s nuclear arms race

Donald Trump came into office as president with an ambiguous stance toward nuclear weapons like Ronald Reagan’s. On Feb.22, President Trump said he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal, alleging that the United States has fallen behind in its nuclear weapons capacity. In an interview with Reuters news service, he called the current New START treaty between the United States and Russia “a one-sided deal.”

Actually, New START sets limits that apply equally to both countries: 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers — land-based intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers.

President Trump apparently does not want to maintain the strategic nuclear stability codified in the New START treaty and its predecessors, in which the world’s two main nuclear powers worked cooperatively for decades to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Now Mr. Trump wants to unilaterally start a new nuclear arms race to put the U.S. on the “top of the pack,” dangerously upsetting the strategic stability that exists.

Along with his call to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal, President Trump said, “It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes,” but he declines to provide leadership in that positive direction. This is reminiscent of President Reagan’s contradictory program to “build up to build down” our nuclear arsenal.

President Trump’s aggressive militarism is of international concern. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom described a potential military build-up by the United States and talk by President Trump of nuclear rearmament as “very worrying.” She stated, “If countries such as the U.S. increase military spending, there is a risk that other countries feel forced to follow. It feels like this takes us back many, many years in time. It feels outdated and counterproductive in our time.”

Forty-seven years ago, the United States committed itself to total nuclear disarmament when it signed the 1970 nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Twenty-one years ago, the International Court of Justice asserted that the NonProliferation Treaty requires the nuclear powers to actually achieve nuclear disarmament, not merely conduct negotiations indefinitely. Our failure to do so during all those years has resulted in the addition of four more countries to the nuclear weapons club, some of which do not have stable governments.

As long as we spend billions of dollars to modernize and maintain our nuclear arsenal, we have no moral authority to demand that other nations abandon their ambitions to follow our bad example.

A 2008 poll of 21 nations around the world found that an average of three-out-of-four people in the United States already favor an international agreement for eliminating all nuclear weapons according to a timetable, with monitoring to verify compliance. The poll of more than 19,000 respondents conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org reported equally large majorities in the other Big Five nuclear powers. In spite of that supermajority public support among citizens of the United States for the abolition of nuclear weapons, there is still strong political opposition to beginning the steps toward that goal.

On the positive side, the United States Conference of Mayors, an official, non-partisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more, unanimously adopted a resolution at its annual meeting in Dallas in June 2014 calling for constructive United States participation in international nuclear disarmament forums. The U.S. mayors also called for the president and Congress to demonstrate a commitment to our disarmament obligation under the NonProliferation Treaty and to reduce nuclear weapons spending to the minimum necessary to assure the safety and securityof the existing weapons as theyawait dismantlement, with the funds saved redirected to meet the urgent needs of cities.

The United States has been in violation of the NPT commitment for many years. Flying in the face of our commitment, we have begun a 30-year program to modernize all of our nuclear warheads, ballistic missile submarines, land-based missiles and bombers at an estimated cost of $1 trillion — a price tag that most experts say we cannot afford.

We have done a lot of talking about arms control but, in truth, we don’t control our nuclear weapons. They control us. They have convinced some of us that we can never get rid of them. That attitude would doom us to live forever under the threat of a mushroom cloud. But if we don’t get rid of them, sooner or later they will get rid of us. With past incidents in both the United States and Russia that have brought us to the brink of an accidental nuclear war, we are already living on borrowed time. And now the emergence of possible nuclear terrorism presents a frightening new threat.

The total elimination of those genocidal weapons is the only absolute guarantee for all of us to be safe from the threat of nuclear annihilation. I do not want my children and grandchildren to live under that threat. It grieves me to see that President Trump does not share that desire for his children and grandchildren.

The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is achievable. Experts have laid out a multilateral, verifiable, step-by-step process to do so. The only requirement for success is the will to carry it out.

The United States of America unilaterally began the nuclear arms race in 1945. We bear the responsibility to begin taking steps to end the curse of nuclear weapons. Our government’s failure to do so is totally irresponsible.

This story was originally published March 26, 2017 at 4:21 AM with the headline "Forward to the past: Trump’s nuclear arms race."