What Trump got right about nuclear weapons—and how to step back from the brink

Speaking to a room of reporters in the White House on February 13, President Trump signaled his interest in restarting arms control negotiations with Russia and China. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

He continued, “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive.”

The United States is already spending $75 billion annually—the equivalent of two Manhattan Projects every year—on new nuclear weapons until at least 2032. In total, the country is set to spend over $1.7 trillion on nuclear modernization over 30 years—which is about the same amount as all student loan debt in the United States.

But what will the country have to show for it?

Counterproductive upgrades. The United States already spends more on national security than the next nine nations combined, and China and Russia have also started expanding and modernizing their arsenals, respectively. But the US arsenal is already more than capable of retaliating against a simultaneous nuclear strike by both countries—which would not change even in a scenario in which China reached numerical nuclear parity with the United States and Russia. Instead, as President Trump suggests, US political leaders must consider how engaging in a massive, new nuclear build-up will waste limited taxpayer dollars and undermine national security by diverting the federal budget from more useful national investments like pursuing infrastructure and electrical grid resiliency.

The current US nuclear modernization program attempts to replace every leg of the US strategic triad—that is, the land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and ballistic missile submarines—all at once. This wildly ambitious program is already massively over budget and years behind schedule. It has also forced the United States to extend the service lives of current systems while waiting for the new systems to come online—something the US military claimed to be infeasible when the process started. The advanced age of the previous generation of nuclear delivery vehicles was a major justification for modernization in the first place.

More fundamentally, the current modernization push is fueled by a pathology of nuclear superiority brinkmanship, which is accelerating a headlong rush into a new nuclear arms race and increasing the odds of a confrontation between nuclear powers. If the United States continues down this path, it will not only be a waste of taxpayer dollars but also weaken strategic stability and increase the risk of nuclear war. The world was lucky to have escaped what President John F. Kennedy called the “nuclear sword of Damocles”—and the United States should be in no hurry to test that fate again.

Stepping toward the brink—and back. While President Trump’s remarks offer hope for a more reasonable nuclear path, his administration is also espousing “peace through strength”—Ronald Reagan’s mantra—as one of the foundations of its foreign policy. The administration’s Republican allies in Congress—including notably Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican of Mississippi who now chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee—have adopted this framing and proposed doubling down on the arms race by adding $200 billion to an already historically high US defense budget.

Other conservatives are pushing Trump to adopt Reagan’s playbook for US-Soviet relations by demonstrating US supremacy internationally, which includes accelerating the nuclear arms race. Most concerning, some allege winning this arms race necessitates being prepared to resume US explosive nuclear testing. And some within the military establishment have called for the reintroduction of tactical nuclear weapons into the US arsenal despite being hugely destabilizing.

But these hawkish policies are only the first part of Reagan’s nuclear weapons chapter.

In 1982, after boosting defense spending by 35 percent, Reagan suddenly reversed course and famously declared in a radio address that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” His reversal on nuclear weapons would be confirmed after witnessing the infamous Pentagon war game Proud Prophet, viewing the cataclysmic effects of nuclear war in the movie “The Day After,” and nearly triggering a catastrophic war with the Soviets. Reagan’s idiom became the bedrock of efforts to avoid mutual destruction through nuclear war, which has been repeated by many officials in the four decades since, including just five years ago at the start of the Biden administration.

In hindsight, Trump can skip to the productive portion of Reagan’s strategy. His intuition is already pointing him in this direction. The president should not be listening to those around him who would like to see the United States embrace a nuclear arms race by chasing after the illusion of strategic superiority and expanding the nuclear arsenal—which Trump already said made no sense. Instead, President Trump should pursue a course of hard-nosed diplomacy like Reagan did to secure the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which eliminated US and Soviet intermediate- and shorter-range missiles in 1985.

The Trump administration could renew Reagan’s crowning achievement by negotiating with Russia and China to limit the growing numbers of new nuclear weapons in the world today. The president has the opportunity to push the United States and other nuclear-weapon states to abide by their disarmament promises regarding nuclear weapons. Should he succeed, Trump could even win a Nobel Peace Prize—becoming just the fifth US president to do so.

President Trump, the United States, and the world would be well served by taking steps to decrease the threats posed by the new nuclear arms race. One question remains: Does he have the courage to stick to his convictions to shut out those around him who would prefer to gamble on Armageddon?