President-elect Donald Trump unleashed a cascade of alarm and analysis at the end of the week with a tweet on the need for a stronger U.S. nuclear deterrent, which led to an interview in which he reportedly indicated his readiness for a new atomic arms race.
Just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin urged his nation to strengthen its strategic nuclear forces, Trump tweeted at about noon Thursday, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
Such a program of nuclear expansion would reverse the policy of President Barack Obama and his predecessors in recent decades, who have drastically shrunk the size of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The stockpile now stands at about 4,600 warheads, according to the Arms Control Association.
As has been the case throughout his campaign and after the Nov. 8 election, Trump had needed only 140 characters to ignite a major news story. Articles quickly appeared across the news media. Issue watchers began trying to parse Trump’s meaning, while some took his statement at face value and urged him to reconsider.
“Your inauguration will occur at a time of growing military tensions with other nuclear powers, and as escalating U.S. nuclear weapons spending puts considerable strains on the federal budget,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to Trump. “Calling ‘to expand [our] nuclear capabilities’ … would only exacerbate these problems.”
Others were more succint: “Nuke experts to Trump: WTF?” tweeted Noah Shachtman, executive editor of The Daily Beast, linking to the publication’s article on the response to Trump’s statement.
The president-elect had his supporters as well. “An absolutely sensible point to make,” James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation and Trump transition team member, tweeted Thursday afternoon. On Friday he noted, “To put in perspective nuclear arsenal defending $18 trillion economy & all nuke and missile defense less than 10% of defense budget.”
Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told NS&D Monitor it is not clear what Trump meant by an expanded nuclear capability. “It seems to have been a reaction to Putin’s comments earlier today on devising nukes to penetrate US missile defenses—a longstanding Russian effort,” he said by email.
“The comments are frankly pretty strange given his apparent desire otherwise to avoid confrontation with Russia that this is the area in which he would choose confrontation,” Pomper said. “Neither country needs to build more nuclear weapons.”
Putin had reportedly said this Thursday prior to Trump’s statement: “We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems.” He added that his country “must carefully monitor any changes in the balance of power and in the political-military situation in the world, especially along Russian borders, and quickly adapt plans for neutralizing threats to our country.”
The Kremlin for years has said the ballistic missile defense system the United States is deploying in Romania and Poland is a threat to Russian security and a potential trigger for a new arms race.
Both the U.S. and Russia are currently in good standing under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which requires each by February 2018 to cap their nuclear arsenals at 700 deployed ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers; 1,550 fielded strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and nondeployed long-range launchers.
These limits are set to expire in 2021, leaving Trump to decide whether to negotiate a new arms control treaty, extend New START for five additional years (an option allowed under the accord), or abandon this form of bilateral arms control. In any case, the Russian government under Putin has not demonstrated much appetite for further nuclear arms control, particularly in light of the currently icy relationship between the two countries.
On Friday, Putin took a cautious stance on the matter, saying Russia did not want a new nuclear arms race or to create new nucleaer weapons, The New York Times reported. He said his military would update its nuclear arsenal and other weapons systems, but that spending should drop to a degree in coming years.
Trump was less restrained. “Let it be an arms race,” he reportedly said in an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
The United States already plans to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad, a cost that arms control advocates and many lawmakers criticize as excessive. The program would involve building new ICBMs, strategic bombers, and ballistic missile submarines, along with a replacement for the Air Force’s current air-launched cruise missile. Money is already flowing from the Pentagon, with Northrop Grumman hired to develop the B-21 bomber and several big defense contractors competing for the technology maturation and risk reduction contract for the new Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent ICBM.
However, it remains unclear whether Trump has a specific plan in mind for augmenting the U.S. nuclear capability, and therefore how it would impact spending levels. Trump’s transition team did not respond by press time to a request for specifics on the expanded nuclear capabilities he suggested. But his representatives deployed elsewhere Thursday and Friday to clarify his comments.
In an email to NBC News after the initial tweet, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said, “President-elect Trump was 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. He has also emphasized the need to improve and modernize our deterrent capability as a vital way to pursue peace through strength.”
Following the present-elect’s later comments, incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said there would be no arms race. “[T]here’s not going to be because he is going to ensure other countries get the message he is not going to sit back and allow that,” Spicer said on NBC’s Today show. “What’s going to happen is they will all come to their senses and we will all be just fine.”
Pomper urged Trump to stick to New START and address tactical nuclear weapon issues. In May, the Congressional Research Service said that while the United States has roughly 760 nonstrategic nuclear weapons – roughly 200 of which are deployed in Europe – Russia is believed to have between 1,000 and 6,000 nonstrategic nuclear warheads in its arsenal.
