In the long-forgotten past of December 2015, when Donald Trump was just one Republican primary candidate among many – and one seen as a long shot who wouldn’t win the nomination, at that – he was memorably asked a question about America’s “nuclear triad”.
The triad is a way of referring to the three elements of the USA’s nuclear deterrence system. It has missiles launched from aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and missiles that can be launched from submarines.
The first two elements are capable of a “first strike” – they would allow the US to start a global nuclear war. The submarines are there as “second strike” – they are always out on patrol somewhere in the world, and they would be able to launch even if the US were otherwise totally destroyed. They are the nukes of last resort. The UK’s much smaller Trident nuclear system is submarine-based, and so it also has “second strike” capability.
The trouble for Trump back in 2015 was that he didn’t seem to know any of this, despite the fact that he was running to be the US President. Instead, on stage, he stumbled over his answer, suggesting only that “nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me”, until another candidate, Marco Rubio, explained how it all worked.
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That was a decade ago. Trump has completed a full term as US President since then, and now that he’s back in office, he has access to the full briefing capabilities of every US intelligence agency. He has even got Rubio at his side as his Secretary of State – and yet he still doesn’t seem to know how the US’s nuclear deterrent is supposed to work.
That’s an accusation that John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor, is making publicly, at least. In recent days, Trump ordered two US nuclear submarines to be redeployed towards Russia, following threats made on social media by former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Medvedev is still a senior Russian politician and a close and trusted ally of Vladimir Putin, so on the surface, it looks tough if Donald Trump responds to his sabre-rattling. But Bolton points out that Trump is just showing Russia he still doesn’t understand the basics of how America’s nuclear weapons work.
Because the submarines are the weapons of last resort, the idea is that these submarines are always at sea, and there is never any indication of where they are – anything that suggests where they might be is potentially damaging to national security.
Bolton, who is well-known in Washington, DC circles as a foreign policy hawk who usually supports military aggression, also notes that an inexperienced commander-in-chief moving nuclear assets risks escalation – the last thing Trump should want is to give Putin or Russia the impression that the US is considering a first strike with a nuclear missile.
Others are alarmed that Trump has ordered nuclear weapons moved just on the basis of something someone posted on X, even if the person doing so is a senior Russian politician. Medvedev is notorious within Russia for making elaborate and dramatic threats against Russia’s enemies, setting the tone for state-controlled media to do the same. He has made threats involving Russia’s nukes on numerous occasions since Russia invaded Ukraine, and is generally ignored when he does so – he is just telling the country’s ultra-nationalists what they want to hear, rather than making a serious statement of policy.
That leaves America in an uncomfortable position. Trump could be forgiven for knowing little about how America’s nukes worked when he was just a candidate. His background was in business, after all, rather than the military – especially when he had avoided the draft due to “bone spurs” on his feet.
Trump, appearing not to know the basics of America’s nuclear arsenal five years into the job of the US President, is more worrying. The US President’s redeployment of strategic nuclear assets on the basis of Russian social media posts is outright alarming. No one would want to live in a world where Russia redeployed nuclear weapons based on the tweets of Liz Truss, after all.
We have survived for decades in a world where the US and Russia alone have enough nuclear firepower to end civilisation in a matter of hours. Our continued survival relies on their careful diplomacy and avoidance of misunderstandings. A temperamental president who doesn’t even understand the basics, then, is truly the stuff of nightmares.
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