Trump and the Bomb
onald Trump has nukes on the brain. During the course of a one hour foreign policy briefing the Republican Presidential candidate asked the same question three times: “If we have nukes, why can’t we use them?”
Joe Scarborough broke the story on August 3 on his MSNBC Morning Joe program. Scarborough did not name his source.
Scarborough said that the briefing was “several months ago.” Scarborough did not say why he waited until now to tell us about it.
The Trump camp has denied the story. However, Trump has made similar remarks in the past. Chris Matthews discussed nuclear weapons with Trump during a March 30, 2016 town hall. Matthews argued that nuclear weapons should never be used. Then why do we have them, Trump asked? For deterrence, Matthews answered. Matthews was referring to the long standing strategic doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) under which the superpowers hold each other in a balance of terror. Any country which launches a nuclear attack will itself be destroyed.
John Noonan agrees that nukes must never be used. Noonan, a Jeb! Bush foreign policy adviser, has first-hand knowledge of nuclear deterrence. As a U.S. Air Force officer, Noonan served in a nuclear missile silo 100 feet beneath Wyoming. The same day as Scarborough’s revelation, Noonan launched a barrage of twenty tweets. Noonan tweeted: “[T]he whole idea behind nuclear deterrence is that you don’t use the damn things.” Noonan said that a President Trump “would be undoing 6 decades of proven deterrence theory. The purpose of nukes is that they are never used. Trump disagrees?”
Well, yes, Trump disagrees. So has every US Administration since Harry Truman. Max Fisher comments in the New York Times that:
Tellingly, though Mr. Trump drew outrage when he said in the March interview that he would not rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe, his comments reflect current nuclear doctrine. The United States reserves the right to use nuclear weapons under certain conditions, such as retaliation for a nuclear attack, anywhere it deems necessary.
Would he or wouldn’t he? That’s a question the public is really not allowed to know—regardless of politicians’ rhetoric. Capitalist politics, its inherent indecency and mendacity, has made honesty in diplomacy and even internal politics impossible.
During the Cold War, when NATO forces were vastly outnumbered by the Warsaw Pact, the United States openly declared that a Soviet invasion of Western Europe would be met with nuclear weapons. People like Matthews and Noonan who delude themselves that the use of nuclear weapons has always been unthinkable, had better think again.
BELOW : Another take on the “Donald & Nukes” meme, making the rounds. This one by Cenk Uygur, of The Young Turks, an independent leftist.
Another problem: to listen to Matthews and Noonan you would think that the only function of nuclear arms is deterrence. Not so. The US has announced that it will spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to upgrade the US nuclear arsenal. Much of that $1 trillion will go towards the design and production of tactical nuclear weapons. Unlike strategic nuclear weapons whose function is, yes, deterrence, tactical nukes are smaller, lower yield weapons designed to be used on the battlefield.
Since tactical nukes are less destructive than strategic weapons there is more of a temptation to use them. Using tactical nukes may escalate to full scale nuclear war.
These tactical nukes will join the approximately 1,750 strategic nuclear warheads the US maintains, according to the Washington DC-based Arms Control Association. As the US launches on its $1 trillion nuclear shopping spree we should not expect Russia and China to simply sit back and watch. What we can anticipate is a new arms race.
Around now, some of you are thinking:
“You’re missing the point. Trump’s comments to Matthews and what Joe Scarborough revealed about Trump prove that Trump is trigger happy. Other politicians can be trusted to use the Bomb only as a last resort, not Trump. Trump is mentally unbalanced and spiteful. Put Trump in the Oval Office and nuclear war is virtually certain to follow.”
Ah, yes, dat ole Mad Bomber Trump. How do I answer this accusation? I don’t have to. Set aside the question whether Donald Trump is any more irresponsible than other presidents (a lineup which has included Nixon and Reagan and George W. Bush). The only way Donald Trump will ever see the inside of the Oval Office is if he pays to take a White House tour. There is no point in speculating how bonkers Trump would be if he got his finger on the nuclear trigger. That is not going to happen.
Are Trump’s views scary? Sure. Trump’s indifference toward nuclear proliferation is particularly disturbing. But Trump is not the real problem. Trump’s views are mostly defense establishment orthodoxy. Trump will be defeated, but humanity will not be out of danger.
If you don’t like Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons, there is not much reason you should feel more comfortable with the defense Establishment. And who is more a part of the Establishment than Hillary Clinton? The neocons are flocking to her. Of the two major party candidates, it is Hillary Clinton, who as Senator voted for the Iraq war and as Secretary of State backed the bombing of Libya, who has a history of aggression.
Ask Hillary what she would do with nuclear weapons. Trump at least will give you an honest, albeit terrifying, answer.
BONUS
Trump wouldn’t be first to weigh nukes: Marc Ambinder
USA Today
More than one president considered strategic use of the nuclear threat during the Cold War.
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]onald Trump has been excoriated over a report that he asked a foreign policy adviser why the U.S. couldn’t actually ever use nuclear weapons. “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” Trump asked, according to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.
While the Trump camp denied the report, almost surely he would not have been the first presidential candidate to break the nuclear taboo by asking those questions. He certainly would not be the first president to think about how nuclear weapons might be used offensively as a policy weapon.
In the summer and early fall of 1969, President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cooked up a plan, code-named Giant Lance, to try to jar the Soviets into pressuring the government of North Vietnam to negotiate more fruitfully with the U.S. How would they do this? They’d place U.S. nuclear forces on alert, seemingly randomly, for no good reason. The Soviets would detect this and assume that Nixon was crazy. They would reason: If Nixon was crazy, what else might he do with nuclear weapons? This fear would cause them to capitulate, to soften their tone, to comply. Who would negotiate with a madman?
In October of that year, the “readiness” alerts began, confusing even senior nuclear commanders in the USA who had not been apprised of the reasons. But they followed orders. The Soviets did indeed notice. They were indeed confused. But they did not react as Nixon had anticipated. They decided not to put their own forces on alert. Instead, as Jeffrey Kimball and William Burr report in their 2015 book, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, the Soviets dispatched their ambassador to ask Kissinger what the hell Nixon was doing. Nixon’s flirtation with coercive nuclear diplomacy did not end the Vietnam War, nor did it rupture the Soviet relationship with North Vietnam.
The U.S. nuclear establishment began a more formal exploration of how to make strategic use of its weapons after Nixon left office. President Carter endorsed several studies and a change in nuclear doctrine that implicitly recognized the possibility that nuclear weapons might actually be useful in certain situations short of a full-scale conflict with the Soviet Union. America was moving toward a posture that would give the president more flexibility.
Jimmy Carter—perhaps one of the most decent men to occupy the White House in recent memory—did not escape the criminal legacy of the job. As the article notes he incautiously opened America’s drift toward first strike, and did not veto the indecent notion of creating a jihad to mess the Soviets in Afghanistan. Neither the monster to be created, nor the incorrectness of helping to overthrow a government that was modernizing Afghanistan mattered much when it came to implement America’s imperial designs.
President Reagan inherited Carter’s policy, but he brought to office a seemingly naive belief that the nuclear establishment was wrong — that nuclear weapons could never be used because they were uniquely horrific. If one side used one, the other side would retaliate; everyone would get lost in the spasm of Armageddon. At first, Reagan had no idea how to manage the tensions among his policy aim of ending the Cold War, his personal preference for direct diplomacy, and his religious conviction that nuclear war had to be avoided at all costs.
Reagan’s words often sent mixed messages. The Soviets were an “evil empire,” he said in March 1983. Later that month, he confused everyone with his proposal for a Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan thought it was the antidote to mutually assured destruction, a way to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” But many of his advisers instead wanted it to be a trump card to establish offensive superiority over the Soviets. At times, the U.S. military seemed to be eager to poke the Soviet bear. Aggressive Navy exercises triggered numerous alerts across the Soviet Union and might have been one reason why Soviet defense forces shot down a Korean airliner that September.
Just two months later, NATO was conducting a nuclear release procedure drill called Able Archer. Col. Gen. Ivan Yesin, commander of a Soviet nuclear missile force, was hiding with his men in a makeshift camouflage command center somewhere in the thick forests outside Moscow. His regiment was on alert. Across the country, leave had been canceled for students at military universities. Intelligence services, aided by a paranoid Politburo and anxious senior generals, had indications that NATO might use this exercise to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Warsaw Pact. Or maybe the U.S. would use its new electronic warfare technology to fry command links between the Soviets and their allies, and from there, decapitate the political leadership of the U.S.S.R.
Yesin’s units, columns of heavy tractors bearing SS-20 Pioneer missiles capable of reaching Europe’s capitals, had been ordered to their wartime positions the day before. Yesin wanted to be with his men. If the order came, he would have launched the nukes without hesitation.
By the time the Russian alert during Able Archer ended, unusual activity across Europe had been detected by various NATO intelligence services, although its significance was missed. Months later, Reagan would learn about it. The CIA debated at the time whether “war scare” fears were real, but Reagan took them seriously. He redoubled his efforts at diplomacy. He modulated his rhetoric and expanded his empathy for Soviet fears. A few years later, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, he presided over the destruction of more nuclear weapons than anyone else on earth, including Yesin’s SS-20s.
Presidents can, have and do use nuclear weapons as instruments of policy. Many of these examples have been hidden from the public because they break with our understanding of nuclear deterrence. So our presidential nominees must be forgiven for asking these questions. That said, Trump has given us every reason to believe he should never, ever be allowed to answer them for us.
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