National Interest

by Graham Allison

    It is often forgotten that President Trump, who grew up during the Cold War, shows a keen interest in nuclear defense and deterrence.

    Last Friday, President Trump slapped down Russia’s former president and deputy chair of the security council, Dmitry Medvedev, for his reckless nuclear threat-mongering. Earlier in the week, as Washington was discussing possible further sanctions on Russia to pressure it to end the war in Ukraine, Medvedev issued a warning: “Each new ultimatum,” he asserted, “is a threat and a step towards war” with a Russian nuclear superpower.

    He recommended that Trump “revisit his favorite movies about the Living Dead and recall just how dangerous the mythical ‘Dead Hand’ can be.” (For readers who don’t recall the movie or the history, the “living dead” refers to the 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead and “Dead Hand” to the Soviet-era nuclear weapons control system that would launch an automatic nuclear strike in the event of a decapitation of the Russian leadership).

    In a deftly-crafted post on Truth Social, Trump immediately sent Medvedev—and his boss Vladimir Putin—a clear response. It read: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Subs to be positioned in the appropriate regions just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.” Trump’s message concludes: “Words are very important and can often lead to unintended consequences. I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

    Historians will note that this is the first case in which an American president has announced publicly to an adversary a change in the US nuclear forces or plans since JFK’s televised address to the American people on October 22, 1962. That was the most dangerous crisis in recorded history. In that case, when US intelligence discovered the Soviet Union attempting to place nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba secretly, JFK announced that “any nuclear missile launched from Cuba will be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

    Simultaneously, the alert status of US forces worldwide, including its nuclear forces, was raised to DEFCON 3. The premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues were on notice. If the nuclear weapons they were sending to Cuba were to be launched against the United States by them or their Cuban allies, the United States would respond with a devastating nuclear attack that would destroy their country.

Last week’s claims about possible uses of nuclear weapons struck most observers as so last century. Thus, the press has had difficulty trying to make sense of what is happening. Would it not have been better, many asked, for the Trump administration to simply dismiss Medvedev’s threats, rather than dignify them by addressing him directly  If it decided to respond, were Trump’s words and actions appropriate to meet Medvedev’s challenge

    For those who have found the first six months of Trump’s second term so discombobulating that at this point they are no longer listening to what he says, the easy answer is no. Predictably, they have criticized what they’ve called his “grandstanding,” pointing out that US SSBNs (nuclear-armed submarines) are always in “appropriate regions” since wherever they are, their missiles can hit targets in Russia.

    If critics were willing to be a bit more charitable (and informed), they might recognize that his statement could be an example of deliberate strategic ambiguity. Repositioning subs could refer to moving US nuclear-powered attack subs (SSNs) to positions from which they pose a more direct threat to Russian submarines. Indeed, it could also include moving US nuclear-powered submarines to locations from which they could launch missiles with conventional warheads—like the ones that destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

    Given the number of issues on which Trump has gotten off on the wrong foot—in my opinion—including the global tariff war, his treatment of allies and his attack on America’s remarkable science and technology ecosystem, among others—could he be right on this most important issue  On the basis of a project that I’ve led over the past two years titled “Taking Trump Seriously,” I believe the answer is yes.

    Indeed, the reason why he may be right in carefully but decisively calling Putin’s lapdog’s bluff is that Trump understands in his bones that nuclear weapons really matter. Indeed, at the risk of making friends worry even more that I may have gone over the deep end, I would go further and argue that Trump has a better understanding of nuclear perils than any other political leader on the national or international stage today. For comparison, the only other recent American leader with a similar deep understanding of this challenge was Joe Biden.

    In Trump’s case, his convictions stem not from what he learned in his first term when he received briefings on the “nuclear football” and the menu of options the president has to choose from in the array of scenarios that might call for the use of nuclear weapons. Rather, they are rooted in lessons he learned when he was a young man from his uncle John Trump, who was a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at MIT. As Trump tells the story, long before he ever dreamed of becoming president, his uncle challenged him to think about the unthinkable. In Trump’s words: “I used to discuss nuclear with him all the time. He was a great expert. He was a great, brilliant genius.”

    Trump understands that there are many pathways to nuclear war. Look again at his warning to Russia about “unintended consequences.” Why has he focused so intensely on ending the war in Ukraine  Not from his love for Putin. Rather, it reflects his appreciation of the ways in which events there, including the possibility that Putin would conduct nuclear strikes on Ukraine and force the United States to respond in ways that could escalate into a war that neither he nor Putin wants.

    As he said in 2023, “Ukraine is being obliterated, but let’s not even talk nuclear. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they were doing better than anticipated. If he [Putin] decided to use his second form of destruction, which is nuclear, that’s the end of that.”

    Last August, in a conversation with Elon Musk on X, Musk asked about the threat of global warming. Musk was surprised when Trump answered, “the biggest threat is not global warming but nuclear warming.” Say what  Musk was polite but clearly puzzled, so he moved on to another topic, as if Trump had said that mankind’s biggest threat was an invasion by extraterrestrials or a comet splitting planet Earth.

    Last September, in the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the moderators asked a question about America’s endgame for the war in Ukraine. They were surprised when Trump took that as a prompt for a riff on Putin’s nuclear arsenal. As he said, “He’s got nuclear weapons. They don’t ever talk about that. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that. And eventually maybe he’ll use them.” His opponent, Kamala Harris and most of the audience and indeed the moderators, seemed dumbfounded.

    When Trump concluded by warning that on the current path, “we’re going to end up in a third World War. And it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry,” some suggested that this might be another “Biden moment”—recalling the then-president’s garbled responses in his debate with Trump. In the contemporary understanding of geopolitics, nuclear weapons have disappeared—consigned to the dustbin of history along with the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War.

    But for Trump and those of his—and my—generation who grew up in an era when nuclear danger hung over the heads of American presidents like the Sword of Damocles, “nuclear weapons are the biggest problems we have.” Trump knows that nuclear weapons did not disappear when the Soviet Union collapsed. He and other serious strategists know that the United States and Russia maintain nuclear arsenals that are capable of withstanding the other’s first strike and responding in a way that destroys the attacker. As surely as his predecessors who fought and won the Cold War, he believes that his single most important duty as president is to avoid a nuclear catastrophe that would destroy the United States and perhaps even endanger all life on Earth.

    When asked about his Medvedev smackdown in an interview on Newsmax, Trump doubled down. As he said: “when you mention the word ‘nuclear,’ my eyes light up and I say, ‘We better be careful,’ because it’s the ultimate threat.” Trump learned from Reagan that “a nuclear war cannot be won and therefore must never be fought”—and he has thought about what that means. As Reagan repeatedly explained, if at the end of a war one had completely eliminated our adversary but our own country had been destroyed, no one could count that as a victory.

    Trump admires JFK’s strategic imagination in finding a viable offramp during the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Kennedy assessed that the risks of nuclear war were between one and three and even. Indeed, like JFK, Trump believes that for nuclear powers with diametrically opposed values to survive, they must find a way to manage their relations without confrontations like the missile crisis.

    In the months ahead, I’m betting that Trump will find his way to his own version of a strategic concept that combines Nixon-Kissinger’s “detente” and JFK’s post-Cuban Missile Crisis vision of a “world safe for diversity.” As Kissinger explained, Nixon’s conception of the central challenge the United States faced in 1969 was “to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war.”

    To quote Kissinger: “Anyone coming to office in the late Sixties could not fail to be awed by the unprecedented dimensions of the challenge of peace. No bellicose rhetoric could obscure the fact that existing nuclear stockpiles were enough to destroy mankind; no amount of distrust of the Soviet Union could endorse adoption of the traditional balance‐of‐ power politics of resolving crisis by confrontation. There could be no higher duty than to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war.”

    Having survived the missile crisis in which he felt existential nuclear danger when making choices that he knew could lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, JFK concluded that the Cold War strategy, which he had been a leading advocate of, required a major course correction. While never wavering from his convictions that the US-led Free World was good and the Soviet Empire evil, he nonetheless proposed that both nations’ first imperative now had to be to find a way to build what he called a “world safe for diversity.”

    As Kennedy put it in the most important foreign policy speech of his career, delivered just five months before he was assassinated: “For in the final analysis, we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Could Trump be right on nuclear weapons  Could he even surprise us with a vision of peace among fierce rivals  Could his sense of this overriding responsibility be shaping his readiness to engage directly with the two leaders whose countries have nuclear arsenals that could erase the USA from the map

    I think so.