Trump’s Nuclear Testing Threat: Playing with More Than Dynamite

The thriller House of Dynamite, playing in theaters and streamed into our homes, leaves its audiences hanging as an unprepared US president must decide humanity’s fate after a surprise nuclear attack. Now picture the real president, Donald Trump, whose uninformed and garbled statement about resuming nuclear testing may have sounded the starting gun for an existentially dangerous multinational nuclear arms race. We can hope that those who may be able to influence this unstable and ill-informed president will devise a face-saving way for him to walk back the threat. But we can’t count on that happening.

In a recent track II session with US, Russian, and European former arms control diplomats, military officials, and analysts, there was something like a consensus that Trump misunderstood one or more reports about recent Russian nuclear activities. The claim is that either Russia or China conducted explosive, rather than subcritical, tests, a claim rejected by the head of the US Strategic Command. Not wanting to be out done by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump made his threat. When questioned about it, Trump reiterated the threat. This has caused profound uncertainty and confusion, leading the Kremlin to request clarification about US nuclear weapons testing policy.

Worth noting is that this brouhaha comes at a time when significant forces within the Republican Party advocate renewed testing. The Kremlin has yet to receive that clarification or another one in response to its offer to extend the most essential elements of the New START Treaty beyond its February expiration date.

Among senior arms controllers, there is an understanding that if the US or Russia resume testing, it will open the gates for extremely dangerous nuclear weapons proliferation. Among the candidates for a nuclear breakout are South Korea, where a majority of the population wants their nation to develop nuclear weapons out of fear of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and growing uncertainties about Seoul’s military alliance with the United States. Other breakout candidates include Saudi Arabia, which recently concluded a military alliance with nuclear Pakistan and near-nuclear Iran. Despite Trump’s claims of having destroyed Tehran’s nuclear program, Tehran moved its highly enriched uranium prior to the Israeli and US missile strikes against its nuclear infrastructure. And as history teaches us, knowledge is not easily destroyed.

In our various nations we can use our people’s power to name, shame, isolate, and insist on no new nuclear weapons testing.

While Russia is reported to be in a position to resume explosive nuclear weapons testing in relatively short order, this is not the case for the US. While the Pentagon could detonate a nuclear weapon as a show of terrorizing force, it would take several years to install highly advanced nuclear testing technologies into the Nevada test site. Similarly, nations that aspire to join the nuclear powers will not immediately be able to test these “weapons of the Devil.”

However, the seminally important Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has successfully limited nuclear weapons proliferation and thus the dangers of nuclear war, will be at risk if Trump persists with the threat to resume nuclear weapons testing. Despite the US and China having yet to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, with the exception of North Korea nuclear powers have respected the moratorium on kinetic testing since the CTBT was negotiated 30 years ago in 1996. Fears abound that if Trump does not reverse course before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which begins at the United Nations in late April, he could torpedo the treaty. Despite the treaty’s double standards and failure to lead to the elimination of the world’s nuclear arsenals as prescribed in Article IV, the treaty remains a powerful diplomatic barrier to nuclear weapons proliferation. Dangerously, the last two Review Conferences were deemed failures for their inability to negotiate and issue a final declaration. The probability is that a commitment to resume nuclear weapons testing would sink the third RevCon.

In the tradition of three strikes and you’re out, a third successive NPT RevCon failure would likely doom the NPT, if not immediately then over the course of several years. In the mistaken belief that nuclear deterrence can provide national security, some states would withdraw from the treaty, become nuclear powers, and the resulting collapse of the treaty would “end the world as we know it.”

Where does this leave us? First and foremost, we have to hope that there is sufficient wisdom and leverage hidden in the cracks of the Trump administration to convince Trump that he needs to reverse course. In our various nations we can use our people’s power to name, shame, isolate, and insist on no new nuclear weapons testing. And with the NPT Review Conference approaching, we can organize to insist that the treaty’s Article IV commitment to nuclear weapons abolition, and previous implementation agreements, be respected.

Along the way we can remind people that even as we are enter and resist a new US-Russia-China Cold War, that arms control agreements between great power rivals can be negotiated, as was the case during the first Cold War. We can urge the US to join with Russia to extend the elements of the New START Treaty beyond the treaty’s February expiration. And we can join efforts to use the new Netflix film House of Dynamite to teach new generations about the existential threat of nuclear weapons and war and the reality that, as the Hibakusha teach, “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”