Why we should not be surprised Trump could do a deal over nuclear weapons with North Korea
German protest against nuclear weapons and the escalation of tensions between US and North Korea, organized by ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) Berlin, November 18, 2017. NurPhoto/Associated Press. All rights reserved. The world was astonished by the
news that President Trump is due
to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to discuss nuclear
disarmament and other security issues on the Korean peninsula.
But should the world have been so surprised ? On 15 December 2015 Donald Trump
said “The biggest problem we have is nuclear – nuclear proliferation and having
some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That's in my
opinion that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”
Just before Christmas in 2016, he
tweeted, as President–elect: “The United States must greatly strengthen and
expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses
regarding nukes.” The
president-elect’s Twitter comments came the same day that Vladimir Putin said
Russia needed to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces.
Later Trump spokesman Jason Miller issued
a statement to NBC News which did not add much clarity, referring “to the
threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it,
particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue
regimes”, as The Washington Post reported
on 23 December 2016.
His tweet seemed to signal a break with decades of presidential actions to
reduce the nuclear arsenal.
As he cranked up his campaign for the United States Presidency, Donald Trump
had uttered many things that left not just the US electorate but the wider
world gasping in near disbelief. At the end of March 2016 he came up with one
of his biggest shock statements, stressing to popular supermarket checkout
PEOPLE magazine his caution at pushing the nuclear button should he be elected
to the White House. “That would be such a last resort … “Nobody is going to
mess with us. But I would be very, very slow on the draw.”
"The depth and gravity of the responsibility of the office seem to elude
Trump so far," Mark Pfeifle, former deputy national security adviser to
President George W. Bush told
PEOPLE. "No one knows if reading the [CIA's daily terror-threat
briefing] would sober him." As the Huffington
Post headlined
the story: ‘President’ Donald Trump Would Only Turn To Nuclear Annihilation
As A ‘Last Resort'; ‘I would be very, very slow on the draw.’”
Should the world breathe a sigh of
collective relief that he is not trigger happy?
Unbounded power
So what do we know about Trump’s thinking
on nuclear weapons? Trump’s former Republican rival for the Presidency, Marco
Rubio, said on the Presidential campaign trail that the US shouldn’t hand
over "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."
As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire
nations is practically unbounded. Today, the nuclear deluge he could command
would consist of thousands of weapons, each 10 or 20 times more deadly than the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nearly 2,000 US strategic nuclear weapons aimed
primarily at Russia and China (at a ratio of roughly 2 to 1), with additional
dozens aimed at each of several other nations – North Korea, Iran and Syria –
were at President Trump’s disposal from his first minutes in office.
For his part, on 23 November 2015 Trump opined: “I would be somebody that would
be amazingly calm under pressure.”
For those looking for any proof of this, an article published
in Slate, the US news web site, – Trump’s
Nuclear Experience: in 1987, he set out to solve the world’s biggest problem – provides a remarkable insight.
Written by senior Slate writer, Ron Rosenbaum,
author of The Shakespeare
Wars, Explaining Hitler and How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War
III, the article resurrects an interview originally given to the author nearly
three decades ago for the now defunct magazine, Manhattan Inc., and held in
Trump’s glitzy office, featuring a golden mirrored ceiling – in his
eponymous New York HQ, Trump Tower.
Rosenbaum recalls:
“Trump is not new to nuclear
matters. He has been thinking about how he’d handle nuclear weapons and nuclear
proliferation for more than a quarter-century, at least since 1987, when he
claimed to me that he was “dealing at a very high level” with people in the
White House (that would have been the Reagan White House) on doomsday
questions.
It seemed like a joke, when I first heard of it back then. But at the very peak
of the Cold War, when the US and the then Soviet Union had an estimated 25,000
nukes to target at each other, thousands of them on hair-trigger alert (no
Trump jokes about “hair trigger” please), Donald Trump announced that he had
the know-how to solve the world’s nuclear problems.”
Rosenbaum explained the context of his interview, reminiscing that his “gig”
was to take the loudest, glitziest luminaries of the loudest, glitziest era of
Manhattan, the power brokers and power lunchers, out to lunch and turn on a
tape recorder, to profile their self-importance. Not just the rich and famous
of biz, but politicos like Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo.
Trump duly revealed that he had grander ambitions than being a very
successful international business guru. Perhaps the grandest, Rosenbaum
records, was “saving the world.” Before lunch he confided that he was talking
to “people in Washington,” even “the White House”; he was on the verge of
breaking through. Even then he wanted to be viewed as something more than a
glam real estate speculator, someone of substance politically.
Even then, nearly three decades ago, Trump demonstrated Trumpian impatience
with “defense intellectuals,” exemplified in his contempt for then-fashionable
nuclear-deterrence theories like “dense pack,” a plan to group US nuclear silos
so close together that attacking missiles would destroy each other by means of
“fratricide” – crashing into each other over the desolate Great Plains.
Trump thought he saw how dense this plan was. He knew about the dangerous
reality of a “hair trigger” nuclear “posture.” He said he had an uncle who was
a nuclear scientist who made him aware of the all-too-easy proliferation of
nuclear weapons. He had read Deadly
Gambits, the sagacious history of the START nuclear reduction talks penned
by nuclear negotiator, Strobe Talbott, a former Time magazine senior reporter,
now President of the prestigious Brookings Institution think tank in Washington
DC.
Trump wanted to begin a crusade to find a way to halt a national security
policy based on nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD), “before a wild-card
nuke deals death to millions.”
Trump believed he had some real personal insight into the nuclear nexus,
telling Rosembaum:
“My uncle who just passed away was
a great scientist. He was a professor at MIT. Dr. John Trump. In fact, together
with Dr. Van de Graaff they did the Van de Graaff generator. He was the
earliest pioneer in radiation therapy for cancer. He spent his whole life
fighting cancer and he ended up dying of it.”
“He told me something a few years ago,” Trump recalled. “ He told me, ‘You
don’t realize how simple nuclear technology is becoming.’ That’s scary. He said
it used to be that only a few brains in the world understood it and now you
have a situation where thousands and thousands of brains can easily understand
it, and it’s becoming easier, and someday it’ll be like making a bomb in the
basement of your house. And that’s a very frightening statement coming from a
man who’s totally versed in it.”
Rosenbaum opined: “if Trump gets his way with this, the way he does with other
deals, it’s not inconceivable that history will look back on the Trump Plan’s
acceptance as one of the few hopeful developments in the course of a miserable
century.”
Trump foresaw the situation when “hair-trigger” heads of state will have their
hands on multiple nuclear triggers. And, Rosenbaum observed, it drove him crazy
that nobody in the White House sensed the danger.
But Trump has now put himself in a position to do something about it himself
with his unlikely atomic summit with the little ‘Rocket Man’.