Can We Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe during the Trump Administration?

Joe Cirincione is the vice-chair of the Center for International Policy’s board of directors and the author of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late.

During the 80 years of the nuclear age, even with the best leadership, the world has avoided nuclear catastrophe by “sheer luck,” as the late Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara often said. The second election of Donald Trump as president introduces new risks into an already volatile mix of geopolitical rivalries, human fallibility and rapid nuclear launch capabilities. This new reality requires new thinking.

First, we must re-orient ourselves. A new nuclear arms race has begun. Those favoring global stability and nuclear risk reductions are in strategic retreat. Our goals must be to minimize our losses and prevent the very worst from happening. With skill — and luck — we can do that and prepare policies for when we may be able to return to the policy offensive. Perhaps in two years, perhaps in four.

Third, the experts and advocates who have tried to shape and implement responsible nuclear policies in this century must confront our collective failure. There has not been a meaningful step to reduce nuclear dangers in a decade, since the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement – and even that was short-lived. The nuclear arms control and disarmament organizations and institutes are weak and growing weaker. There is little reason to expect this enfeebled civil society  to  have measurable impact in the future without a frank assessment of what has gone wrong, followed by serious reorganization and reorientation.

Fourth, we must face the unique nuclear risks Donald Trump presents. His plans for a massive nuclear build up, combined with his likely weakness in the face of Russian aggression and his ambivalence around the status of Taiwan, could encourage the acquisition or use of nuclear weapons by one or more countries. His withdrawal from American global leadership will undermine the credibility of the U.S. pledge to defend its allies with all its military resources, including nuclear weapons, encouraging these allies and others to develop their own nuclear arsenals. There remains the chance that a beleaguered, unstable Donald Trump could use nuclear weapons, acting on the many nuclear threats he made in his first term in office.

While all of these risks indicate the peril of Trump once again gaining control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal, they only compound the risk posed by the considerable funding  Congress has already appropriated for duplicative nuclear weapons.

The New Nuclear Arms Race

Even before the election of Trump, nuclear arms controls were undergoing an extinction event.

Every year, agreements that stood for decades as guardrails preventing nuclear war are weakened or killed. Every year, more organizations that have championed these agreements disappear. There is little prospect that anything can be done to reverse this trend in the near term. While it is possible that Trump could arrive at some new agreements (as he almost did with North Korea during his first term in office), it is more likely that he will appoint to key positions those opposed to any limits on U.S. nuclear forces, and those that will seek an expansion of nuclear arms. 

These sentiments are not new. The desire to build more and bigger bombs began even as scientists were developing the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. That experience, and the subsequent use of atomic bombs on Japan, also catalyzed urgent efforts to control and eliminate these weapons. Scientists from Los Alamos launched several groups still active today, warning  the public about the grave nuclear dangers, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists.  

Most organizations working to prevent nuclear war, however, trace their origins to the 1960s or 1980s. During these decades there were global events that stirred publics to action – and encouraged governments to more urgently pursue limitations on the most deadly weapons ever invented. 

Most prominently, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with its close escape from global thermonuclear war and spike in public fears, helped launch a wave of negotiations culminating in the 1968 NuclearNon-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the 1972 SALT treaty.  Similarly, the US-Soviet nuclear build ups in the early 1980s brought millions of people to the streets of Western capitals, creating political pressures that yielded the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, the START treaties of 1991 and 1993, and almost led to the elimination of all nuclear weapons at the 1987 Reykjavik Summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Michel Gorbachev.

Indeed, most of the agreements, treaties and technology controls limiting or eliminating nuclear weapons evolved during these periods. They are dying off today, however, like the trilobites that once dominated the planet but could not survive the steady acidification of the ocean in the Permian extinction, 300 million years ago.

The most recently endangered treaty is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which bans nuclear weapons in space. U.S. officials suspect that Russia is now developing precisely this capability. Deploying such a weapon would threaten hundreds of satellites in space and the 57-year old treaty. It would be just the latest loss in the web of agreements that make up the arms control regime. 

This is happening even though the arms control regime, although imperfect, works. Arms agreements have helped prevent nuclear war and dramatically reduced the nuclear arsenals that menaced the world throughout the twentieth century. Today, weapon stockpiles are down some 88 percent from their Cold War peaks. Whereas President John F. Kennedy feared that some 15 or 20 nations could acquire nuclear weapons, there are still just nine nuclear-armed nations in the world, even though dozens more have the ability to make these weapons.

The very success of arms control and disarmament stirred two dangerous beliefs: one was that the agreements were no longer needed; the other was that they had gone too far and the U.S. needed to rebuild its arsenal.

The Arms Control Extinction Event

The die-off of nuclear arms control agreements began in December 2001. That is when President George W. Bush listened to long-time nuclear hawks, particularly John Bolton, and abandoned President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had negotiated this accord with the Soviet Union as part of the SALT treaty, the first agreement that limited nuclear arms. They understood that limiting so-called “offensive weapons” required limiting defensive weapons, since the easiest and most obvious way to overcome an opponent’s defense is to overwhelm it with offense. 

Bolton and Bush rejected this logic. Bush withdrew the country from the ABM treaty, using the 9/11 attack as justification for a crash program to build a national missile defense system. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin acquiesced but opposed the withdrawal, arguing that it would compel Russia to develop new weapons. Even if the defenses didn’t work, Russia would have to assume they might work and build weapons to overcome them. 

The promised defenses did not work, do not work, and are unlikely to work in the future. Twenty-three years later, there is still no effective national missile defense nor any prospect of one in the foreseeable future, despite annual budgets of almost  $30 billion for missile defense and defeat programs. 

The weapons triggered by the killing of the treaty, however, do work. New Russian weapons are now coming on line, including powerful new missiles that can carry multiple warheads to overcome defenses, as well as exotic long-range cruise missiles, hypervelocity missiles and even nuclear-armed underwater drones that could theoretically evade any conceivable defense. Net result: no defense; greater offense.

The ABM Treaty was just the first to die. Bolton also convinced Bush in 2003 to leave the Agreed Framework with North Korea that had frozen that country’s nuclear program. He promised that pressure, not agreements, would bring North Korea to its knees. That, too, backfired. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon in 2006 and now has a small arsenal that it could launch against America on a growing fleet of long-range, highly-capable ballistic missiles. There is no defense that can stop them.

Over the past few years, Putin warmed to the idea of killing arms control. During the Trump administration, Putin and Trump withdrew from Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty (allowing each side to fly aircraft over the other’s territory to confirm compliance with military force reductions), treaties limiting conventional forces (the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty and the Vienna Documents), and, most recently, Putin has suspended Russia’s compliance with the New START treaty, negotiated by President Barack Obama as the successor to Ronald Reagan’s START treaties that began the sharp reductions in U.S. and Russian arsenals.

Destroying agreements that limit or eliminate weapons has consequences. The mutual withdrawals from the INF treaty allowed first the United States and now Russia to field new medium and intermediate-range missile systems. Russia in late November attacked Ukraine using a conventionally armed version of an intermediate-range ballistic missile that would have been prohibited by the treaty. Both countries plan to deploy such dual-capable systems in Europe in a revival of the Euro-missile crisis of the 1980s.

“There is no question that we are in a situation where the security system that was so laboriously built up in the Cold War years is being shredded,” says Rose Gottemoeller, who was the lead U.S. negotiator for New START.  

This security system is an interlocking network of treaties, export restrictions and security guarantees. This gives it great strength and global resiliency. It is also a weakness. 

Proliferation abhors a vacuum

As treaties are discarded and commitments withdrawn like pieces of a Jenga tower, the structure wobbles. The removal of just one critical accord could bring the entire regime crashing down. 

That piece could be the New START treaty. It is the last remaining treaty limiting the long-range nuclear weapons of Russia and the US, the two largest nuclear-armed states by far. The accord will expire in 2026. There are no talks between the two countries to replace the treaty. When it dies, the era of limiting and reducing strategic nuclear weapons that began in 1972 will come to an end.

The death of New Start could accelerate the destruction of the entire regime, including barriers to new nuclear-armed nations. 

The centerpiece of the regime is the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by all but four nations in the world.  At its core is the pledge by the nuclear-armed states “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Non-nuclear nations, in turn, promise not to develop nuclear weapons while those with the weapons move steadily to eliminate their stockpiles. 

Break that deal, and the treaty could collapse. First slowly, and then in a cascade of new programs in many nations. 

Swept away, too, would be the nuclear test ban treaty, which since 1994 has largely blocked the testing of new weapons. (The only nation to test a nuclear weapon in this century is North Korea.) Former Trump officials have already proposed in their Project 2025 manifesto that the nation must formally reject the test ban treaty and prepare to resume nuclear testing. China, having conducted only 50 nuclear tests compared to the over 1,000 conducted by the U.S., would relish the opportunity to test new designs. With renewed testing, the new arms race would explode, figuratively and literally.

The race has already begun. The United States leads the way with a sweeping replacement of all its weapons constructed during the 1980s. Over the next decade, America will spend over $750 billion on brand new nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, missiles and warheads. That is just a down payment on programs that will cost trillions of dollars over the next thirty years. 

Russia and China are racing to keep up. Each nation sees the others as the problem. U.S. security leaders, for example, refer to China as “the pacing threat” as they urge the production of more nuclear weapons. China sees it as the other way around. Three nuclear armed states border in South Asia, where India and Pakistan have their own regional arms race. Each of the nine nuclear-armed states is building more and newer nuclear weapons.

Trump’s Project 2025 recommendations would substantially increase these risks and costs. Unlike other generalized calls for more weapons, this is a detailed plan for how to implement an apocalyptic vision and minimize any opposition. It is a far more specific design than any before it. If these recommendations are implemented they will result in a sharp decline in American security and a dramatic increase in the risk of regional and global conflict.

The Decline of the Arms Control Movement

One might imagine that as the crisis in arms control worsens, groups promoting arms control would flourish. But the opposite is happening. 

Last year, one of the largest organizations in the field, Global Zero, collapsed. The year before, one of the veterans of the 1980s, Women’s Action for New Direction, closed its doors. Others will follow. It is difficult to find any American arms control organization that is growing. Most are small and contracting. It is difficult to point to any success that even the largest have achieved in over a decade. The field is in a death spiral.

The reasons are threefold: lack of funding, lack of public support, and the failure of the organizations to sustain a change in nuclear policy.

Last year, the MacArthur Foundation withdrew from the field, cutting in half the foundation funding available to limit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Philanthropies provided a meager $23 million in grants for the entire field in 2023, according to the Peace and Security Funders Group which tracks such giving. This is a fraction of the estimated $8 to 12 billion donated in 2022 to address the climate crisis.

Donors appear skeptical that non-government organizations can motivate meaningful change in nuclear postures. Why give money to groups that cannot show any impact? 

Indeed, in this century, there have been only three successful campaigns that significantly impacted nuclear policy. They are the coalition effort that encouraged the successful negotiation and adoption of the New Start treaty in 2010; a similar coalition that supported the agreement rolling back and freezing Iran’s nuclear program in 2014, and the global effort that produced the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017.

The first of these agreements, as noted, is on life-support. The Iran Deal is dead after President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018. The nuclear weapons ban treaty, while signed by 93 nations, has been ignored and vilified by most of the nine nuclear-armed states.

These failures are not for lack of trying. The nuclear field has some of the brightest, hardest-working experts, advocates and communicators in the business. For decades, they have worked to reverse the arms race, often recruiting nuclear weapons advocates to the cause.

The Reagan nuclear build-up, for example, was guided by the relentless advocacy of a network of nuclear hawks organized into The Committee on the Present Danger. Founded in 1976, these experts preached that the opening of a “window of vulnerability” would soon allow the Soviet Union to launch a devastating first strike on the United States that would eliminate our ability to respond. The answer, they said, was a massive new nuclear build up.

The Nuclear Freeze movement was born in response to this nuclear hysteria. Mass movements, expert analysis and congressional opposition to new nuclear weapons programs combined to convince President Reagan to reverse course. Arms control worked so well that by 1994, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the founding members of the Committee, Paul Nitze, advocated the step-by-step elimination of the weapons he once championed. “The idea that the future peace and well being of the world should rest upon the threat of nuclear annihilation of large numbers of noncombatants is, in the long run, unacceptable,” he wrote.

As arsenals continued to decline, it became possible to see this vision as a practical path. In January 2007, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn wrote the first of several op-eds calling for “a world free of nuclear weapons.” Former Committee on a Present Danger leader Max Kampleman joined the effort, forcefully arguing for “zero nuclear weapons” in talks around the world.

Two major NGO efforts were launched to help realize this goal. The first, built around the work of the four statesmen and their op-ed, was the Nuclear Threat Initiative begun by former Senator Sam Nunn and CNN founder Ted Turner. The second was Global Zero, a U.S.-based group led by former Minuteman control officer Bruce Blair, that convened hundreds of former officials and experts in high-level summits around the world.

Both produced detailed reports, had dozens of experts testify before government bodies, convened scores of impactful conferences and workshops and generated hundreds of articles, videos and even films, such as Countdown to Zero. President Barack Obama and his 2008 opponent Senator John McCain, both embraced the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed, the first global security speech Obama gave as president was devoted to articulating this vision and a practical path to realize it. 

Both efforts failed. There has never been an “after action” report analyzing why they failed. But the failure is clear. In hindsight, we can mark the Senate approval of the New START treaty in December 2010 as the high water mark of the nuclear abolition movements. There have not been any negotiated reductions in global arsenals since. The 2016 election of President Trump brought open nuclear hawks back in control of U.S. policy. President Joe Biden did nothing to change these policies. 

Twilight Struggle

While in office, Biden fully funded all the new nuclear weapons programs. Almost all are now severely behind schedule and over-budget. He leaves office with no new agreements in sight. No official has paid any cost for these demonstrable failures. 

At best, we have a glimmer of hope that, before he leaves, President Biden could use his executive power to end the Cold War practice of “sole authority.” Biden could prevent Donald Trump or any future president from starting a nuclear war “without other senior officials being directly involved in a decision to use America’s most powerful weapons,” as Jon Wolfsthal, former National Security Council senior director for arms control under President Barack Obama, urged in The Washington Post last December. This would bring attention to the threat inherent in the existence of these weapons (and potentially prevent a crazed president from unilaterally destroying human civilization.)

Ploughshares Fund Executive Director Liz Warner summarizes the components of this new nuclear crisis in a video prepared by her foundation:

At the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons stockpiles were quickly declining after a high point of 70,000 nuclear warheads…This was the result of treaties that greatly reduced global nuclear arsenals…This new trend showed the promise of a new day. A future free of nuclear weapons seemed like a real possibility. We enjoy decades of a world where it felt like the wheel of progress was turning. Today, all of this progress is under threat.

•Russia has walked away from negotiating new treaties as the last one is about to expire. This, after the country used the threat of nuclear weapons in their invasion of Ukraine.
•After years of maintaining a modest nuclear force, China is now significantly expanding its arsenal, possibly to as many as 1500 warheads by 2035.
•Tensions in the Middle East continue to boil over with the looming threat of nuclear weapons lurking in the background. Israel already possesses nuclear weapons if the conflict expands. Having seen the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal, Tehran may make a strategic decision to develop them.
•North Korea, once the new kid on the nuclear block, has now been a nuclear armed state for nearly 20 years. Its unconstrained program continues to advance, aided by regular and highly public missile tests.
•In the West, distressing numbers of elected officials are embracing a new proliferation of nuclear weapons as an inevitability.
•We are in a new nuclear arms race. Our planet is on the wrong trajectory.

Might President Trump reverse this slide towards disaster? It is possible that Trump, who has pledged to slash government spending, may look for savings by slowing down or eliminating some of these weapon programs.

He would have support from many in Congress. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) this year requested a study from the Congressional Budget Office detailing alternatives to the massively expensive nuclear programs, citing fears “about the effects of a buildup on both arms-race and crisis stability and counseling for more efforts at preserving or reestablishing arms control.”

It is also possible that Trump could negotiate new arms limitation agreements. He came close to a break-through deal with North Korea, but at the last minute foolishly listened to John Bolton’s advice at the 2019 Hanoi summit instead of negotiator Steve Biegun. Trump scuttled the step-by-step reduction plan worked out by Biegun, in favor of Bolton’s demand that North Korea give up all its weapons in exchange for vague US promises. North Korea (aware of how that kind of deal worked out for Libya) walked away and has now built up its arsenal and forged closer ties with Russia.

Still, Trump might work out some arrangement with Iran or agree with Putin that after the death of New START, both sides could increase their deployed forces but stay within some informal limit of, say, 2500 weapons each, up from the current 1550 limit in New START.

The more likely scenario is that nuclear hawks and large corporations will continue to dominate policy making in the Defense Department, pushing for more weapon programs. The military budget, now at about $870 billion, is likely to break the $1 trillion barrier for the first time in American history. As long as the pie is growing, defense leaders are likely to divide the spoils so that each grouping, including the Strategic Command, gets a large slice. Annual spending for nuclear weapons and related programs will likely soar past the $100 billion mark.

Strategies to Reduce Nuclear Dangers

The very first step in avoiding extinction is simply to be aware of the threat.

A re-elected Trump will likely put nuclear weapons programs on steroids, trash the  remaining U.S. participation in  the global arms control regime, and trigger discussion of new nuclear weapons programs in more other states than we have seen since the early 1960s. Indeed, Trump’s election has intensified talks in some countries that, in a period of uncertain American leadership and growing threats from Russia and China, they need to develop their own nuclear weapons. This is not just adversaries like Iran, but allies like South Korea where a growing majority of the public already favors developing nuclear weapons.

It is unlikely that in their present state, the existing pro-arms control organizations and research programs can have a meaningful impact on Trump’s nuclear policies. Nor is a mass anti-nuclear movement likely to emerge, as it did in the 1980s. There are, however, several possibilities that could develop measurable influence over nuclear policy.

The first and easiest is for the existing groups to merge. As it stands, they are simply too weak to have any discernible political impact, but united they might. There are a few that could continue on their current budgets and funding streams. Most will, at best, limp along as funding grows more constricted. If just a few of the groups could agree to merge efforts, it could snowball. Mergers would increase their size, visibility and clout while reducing administrative overhead.

Similarly, research programs and academic institutes could agree to cooperate on substantive reports documenting the current crisis, its root causes and plans for preserving and modernizing nuclear security agreements. While a report from projects at Stanford, Harvard and Princeton is always valuable, a combined report would generate more interest and produce more impact on policy makers. The same is true for research projects at think tanks, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace or the Brookings Institution.

The recently formed Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation and U.S. National Security is a recent example of such an approach. This centrist group is the result of a collaboration among Harvard University’s Belfer Center, the Carnegie Endowment and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. They hope to issue a report in mid-2025 “with policy recommendations to guide the future of U.S. national security policy.” Whether the Trump White House will listen to such a group is an open question, but it could help develop a consensus among those outside the extremes represented by the incoming administration.  

The relative rarity of such cooperation is a testament to the strong institutional reluctance and competition for recognition that motivates most organizations in the field. Another approach could be for major donors to encourage coordination by funding a new campaign. Several large donors could agree to fund such a campaign headquartered in a single institute (perhaps one not associated with previous efforts), providing grants to experts, advocates and communications mavens conditioned on their participation in a joint effort.

This was the model successfully developed and deployed in the New Start campaign and the Iran Deal coalition in the 2010s. These two campaigns built on the success of similar campaigns in the 1980s to extend and strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to negotiate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. Those, in turn, learned from the successful campaign to Save the ABM Treaty in the 1980s. 

These formal, cooperative, jointly-funded campaigns are the only ones that have worked absent the kind of mass mobilizations represented by the Nuclear Freeze movement. 

All these efforts were three-legged stools, relying on the work and cooperation of experts, who develop and validate alternative nuclear policy; advocates, who work with government officials in the executive and legislative branches to advance the policies; and messengers, who build public support for the policies through sustained media engagement. 

Another possible method is for donors to provide grants to add a nuclear weapons or Pentagon budget component to larger, established expert and advocacy groups. This could fit in well with groups looking to protect social programs from Trump’s budget ax, providing an alternative source of budget savings. Stand alone efforts have failed, but an integrated approach may have a better chance of success. This technique worked well for the Iran campaign, bringing in groups such as MoveOn, Indivisible, Vote Vets and J Street who otherwise may not have had the resources to work on the issue.

If none of the above approaches prove feasible, or if Trump’s hammerlock on the executive and legislative branches is judged too powerful to overcome, a campaign based primarily on communications might work.

Media and Mass Movements

Donors often look to duplicate the impact of the ABC movie event, The Day After. It was one of the most dramatic communications events of the 1990s, said to have even moved President Reagan towards nuclear abolition. 

It is possible that one or more such movies could reawaken public concern about nuclear risks. Annie Jacobson’s brilliant 2024 novel, Nuclear War: A Scenario, for example, could be such an event. Dune director Denis Villeneuve has purchased the film rights to the book. “The expectation is that Villeneuve would take this one as another giant project after he completes Dune: Messiah, which he and Legendary are developing as the conclusion of the trilogy,” reports the Hollywood publication, Deadline. 

Many thought that the award-winning film, Oppenheimer, could play such a role. While it had a huge impact on audiences, however, it had no such corresponding impact on policy. Nor did it spontaneously generate a new anti-nuclear movement. 

The lesson may be that a movie or show has to be part of an existing movement rather than relying on it to instigate such a movement. The Day After aired in 1983 during the Nuclear Freeze movement that had already generated one million people to demonstrate at a rally in Central Park in 1982. Films can validate the concerns of thousands of people already in motion but not generate momentum where none exist.

Absent a mass movement, the value of such a movie could best be realized by coalitions of experts and groups prepared and funded to amplify its message as part of a multi-faceted campaign.

“It’s vital that we use media technology to reverse the direction that we seem to be headed in again,” says David Craig, author of Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped End the Cold War. “I don’t think that it’ll be in the form of a one-off Hollywood narrative. It would need to be dozens coming together and letting communities know that this is something that we can’t afford to ignore.”

Alternatively, a big-event film or series could help generate collective action if it came out during a period of heightened media concern over nuclear dangers. Starved of funds, many news organizations could benefit from generous grants to support their investigation of the growing nuclear risks. The Outrider Foundation is engaged in such a strategy with its no-strings grants to The New York Times, the Associated Press and others. The foundation does not dictate the content of the reporting, its grants merely allow journalists to pursue their own analysis.

Conclusion

We are at a critical crossroads. The path forward is not clear. This article is intended to stimulate discussion; it is not meant to be the final word. It is the author’s hope that others will contribute articles correcting this analysis, offering their own, or deepening particular points raised. Others may want to explore why past efforts failed, drawing lessons for future work. 

We must start by recognizing that we are in a deep hole. It will take sustained, collective work to get us out and to chart a new course.

More About the Author

Joseph Cirincione was president of Ploughshares Fund for 12 years. He was previously the vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress; the director of nuclear non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and a senior fellow and director of the Committee on Nuclear Policy, the Campaign to Reduce Nuclear Dangers and the Campaign for the Non-Proliferation Treaty at the Stimson Center. He worked for nine years on the professional staff of the House Armed Services Committee and the Government Operations Committee. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author or editor of seven books and over a thousand articles on nuclear policy and national security.