Nuclear Threat Initiative V: The Trump Years, Part One
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.
Donald Trump was inaugurated president in January 2017, four years short of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s twentieth anniversary.
How would things be different for the Nuclear Threat Initiative under President Trump? I mean when it came to the commitment President Obama had made to eliminate nuclear weapons? I hadn’t seen any evidence during the campaign that Trump embraced Obama’s commitment to “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” or cared about the issue.
He had to care at least a little bit about nuclear weapons. As President, he was the one—the only one in the way we’d had things set up since early in President Truman’s administration—who could order the use of nuclear weapons.
After Trump was elected, the question had arisen whether anyone could countermand a president’s order to use nuclear weapons. That I can’t tell you. I don’t know who could. Anyone along the line could refuse to execute the order, but that’s different, and, I suppose, pretty unlikely.
As President, Trump could now, unlike the rest of us, be told anything about nuclear weapons. Not only could be told but would have to be told. If he asked. And if we knew.
Like the rest of us, there would be a lot he wouldn’t know yet about nuclear weapons. He would have to be “briefed” in the Pentagon by our military leaders.
After the atomic bomb came into the world in 1945, every newly elected President, starting with President Eisenhower, had needed such a briefing. And right away. Especially after the introduction of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at the end of Eisenhower’s administration. An attack with ICBMs armed with nuclear weapons could now happen at any time, even before the inauguration ball. There would be only a few minutes warning and no defense against it.
The Washington Post reported that after his briefing, President Trump had asked his national security advisors, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
That suggests he’d been told we couldn’t use them, doesn’t it? We weren’t told how his question was answered.
One answer he might have been given is, “We are using them, Mr. President. For deterrence.”
President Trump would have meant “use them” not for deterrence but in the way we had used them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’m pretty sure. Detonating them on enemies, not just threatening to do it.
President Obama had said at the beginning of his administration that deterrence was the only thing we would use them for. But think: doesn’t that mean that if, or rather when, deterrence fails, we wouldn’t be able to use them in the way President Trump meant? Deterrence always fails, finally, doesn’t it? If deterrence had failed and we’d been attacked you used our nuclear weapons in the way Trump meant, you couldn’t be using them for deterrence anymore, could you?
Revenge, maybe. Even though our use of them for revenge would be likely to produce what some had called “omnicide.” The death of everything. If you used them, you’d be killing yourself if you hadn’t already been killed. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?
In the case of stateless terrorists who have managed to acquire a nuclear weapon, deterrence doesn’t apply in the first place. This point had been made in 2007 in that op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by the four former Cold Warriors—George Shultz, Sam Nunn, William Perry and Henry Kissinger. We dealt with than in an earlier entry.
A different and, I think, better question for a newly elected President to ask might be, “If we can’t use them, why do we have them?” That one might not have occurred to President Trump: it was clear he didn’t have a problem with fact that we had nuclear weapons as long as we had more than anyone else. The report in the Post had said that President Trump thought we should have more than the 4000 or so we had. As many as we’d had during the Cold War even. That was about 7 times more than we had now.
In 1977, during the Jimmy Carter administration, a Department of Energy had been created in the Executive Branch to oversee all our different kinds of energy—oil and gas, hydroelectric power, solar power, as well as our federal efforts to promote energy conservation. Oh, and the nuclear power reactors we had for generating electricity.
The Department of Energy would also be responsible for the design, testing, and production of our nuclear weapons.
Many of us seem to think our military is in charge of our nuclear weapons. Our military does now have custody of them. But since early in the administration of President Truman, it has been understood that any use of these weapons requires the approval of our president, who is a civilian. There’s no law requiring this, as far as I know. It’s just become accepted practice.
Our Constitution does say that our President, a civilian, is also the Commander-in-Chief of the military.
President Trump now needed to appoint a Secretary of the Department of Energy. The person he chose was, well, he hadn’t figured that out yet. He appointed an “acting” Secretary. That meant the person wouldn’t have to be confirmed by the Senate but also wouldn’t be able to accomplish much. Her name was Grace Bocheneck and she was an industrial engineer who had worked in the Pentagon. She wasn’t “acting” for very long, though. Just a month.
A man named Rick Perry had run for President in 2012. Rick Perry had taken over from George W. Bush as governor of Texas when Bush became President. Perry, like all the Republican candidates, was very much against “government spending,” except for the military. In his campaign he had advocated abolishing, along with the Departments of Education and Commerce, the Department of Energy. He hadn’t advocated abolishing nuclear weapons, just the Department of Energy.
Then, in a Republican debate in November 2011, he hadn’t been able to remember the name of the Department of Energy that he had declared he wanted to abolish. This didn’t help his numbers. In January 2012, he dropped out of the race.
In February 2017, President Trump chose Rick Perry to be Secretary of the Department of Energy. The Senate confirmed him handily. Not a particularly good omen for the Nuclear Threat Initiative and its goals, you could think.
Good for the oil business maybe. Rick Perry was a fifth generation Texan. Very handsome man with good hair.
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, see the Archive.