Donald Trump’s New Nuclear Instability
By
Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan for Truthdig
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President-elect
Donald Trump exploded a half-century of U.S. nuclear-arms policy in a single
tweet:
“The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
With that one vague message, Donald Trump, who hasn’t even taken office yet,
may have started a new arms race.
Trump’s
statement set off alarms around the world, necessitating a cadre of his inner
circle to flood the airwaves with now-routine attempts to explain what their
boss “really meant.” On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow confronted former Trump campaign
manager and newly appointed Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway about the shocking
tweet:
Maddow:
“He’s saying we’re going to expand our nuclear capability.”
Conway:
“He’s not necessarily saying that—”
Maddow:
“... He did literally say we need to expand our nuclear capability—”
Conway:
“...What he’s saying is…we need to expand our nuclear capability, really our
nuclear readiness, our capability to be ready for those who also have nuclear
weapons.”
The
next morning, during a commercial break on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,”
Trump spoke by phone with Mika Brzezinski, as she and her co-host Joe
Scarborough sat in pajamas on the Christmas-themed TV set.
The
call was not broadcast, but when the show came back from the break, Brzezinski
quoted Trump as saying, “Let it be an arms race ... we will outmatch them at
every pass and outlast them all.”
Minutes
after that aired, Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, told us
on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “Every day, Trump says something that makes
us worried, but this may be the most terrifying yet. A nuclear-arms race is the
last thing that the world needs. I think about climate change. I think about
economic inequality. I think about all of these major threats that we’re facing
as a country and as a world. Why would we add on top of that a totally
manufactured, unnecessary threat?”
President Barack Obama delivered his first address on the U.S. nuclear arsenal on April 5, 2009, in Prague: “Today, the Cold War has disappeared, but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons.”
Then,
in 2016, he proposed a 30-year, $1 trillion dollar nuclear arsenal
modernization program.
When
asked about Obama’s record, Annie Leonard told us, “Greenpeace and many of our
allies fought against President Obama’s military spending, and we will fight
against President Trump’s military spending.”
While
Obama’s nuclear spending continues what Albert Einstein called, in 1946, the
“drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,” it still adheres to the current
in-force nuclear-reduction treaty between the U.S. and Russia, called New
START.
This
calls for the reduction in the number of warheads in both nations’ stockpiles
from the current amount of roughly 7,000 warheads each, to 1,550 warheads each
by February 2018.
Trump’s
declarations suggest he would scrap New START and relaunch a new nuclear-arms
race between the U.S. and Russia.
This,
in turn, could easily trigger the desire among other existing nuclear states,
like India, Pakistan and Israel, to increase their stockpiles.
Trump
also repeatedly stated throughout the presidential campaign that he supports the
acquisition of nuclear weapons by other nations, including Japan, South Korea
and Saudi Arabia. And he has said the opposite on other occasions, which only
highlights the volatility and unpredictability of this incoming commander in
chief.
In
such an unstable world, with an increasing number of nuclear weapons, the
likelihood only increases that someone, somewhere will hit the button.
Alarmed
at the recent developments, one group has launched a petition urging the
current president to take action. “With the stroke of a pen, President Barack
Obama could take our nuclear missiles off high alert, making sure that
President Trump could not launch them rashly,” writes Joe Cirincione, president
of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation.
“Trump
will have the unfettered ability to launch one or one thousand nuclear warheads
whenever he pleases. Four minutes after he gives the order, the missiles will
fly. No one can stop him, short of a full-scale mutiny. Once launched, the
missiles cannot be recalled.”
Yes,
Obama should take the weapons off high alert, but that’s not enough. Donald
Trump’s finger on the nuclear trigger is a terrifying prospect.
©
2016 TruthDig
Amy Goodman is
the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international
TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded
the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and
received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
Denis Moynihan is
a writer and radio producer who writes a weekly column with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman.