Nuclear Threat Initiative V: The Trump Years, Part Two
You Might Want to Know will take a break in the week of Thanksgiving, resuming the following week. I’m thankful for my intrepid readers.
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.
The Department of Energy is the department in the Executive Branch of our government that oversees our nuclear weapons. And our nuclear power reactors. And our oil and gas and solar. And our conservation efforts. A lot.
President Trump chose Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, to be Secretary of Energy. In 2012, during his own presidential campaign, Rick Perry had said he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy. Still, he did take the job.
The Secretary of Energy for President Obama had been a man named Ernest Moniz. He was short, a little stout, and had let his straight gray hair grow long on the sides.
Ernest Moniz was a physicist. He ended up being deeply involved in negotiating the treaty with Iran called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been signed during President Obama’s second term by the five UN Security Council members, Germany, and Iran, and ratified in the first year of President Trump’s administration. The treaty greatly limited Iran’s program of uranium enrichment.
President Trump said the JCPOA was a terrible deal. I think he said that about every deal the Obama administration had made.
Even before President Trump was inaugurated, Ernest Moniz resigned as Secretary of Energy. On January 6, 2017, he became a co-director of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, joining Ted Turner and Sam Nunn, who had been co-directors of NTI from the beginning in 2001. Moniz also was made the Chief Executive officer of NTI. Until this moment, Sam Nunn had been CEO.
At the same time, a new President and Chief Operating Officer for NTI was appointed. Her name was Joan Rohlfing. Joan Rohlfing had been Senior Vice-President at NTI for the last eight years. She had begun her career in the Department of Defense, then worked as a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee where she oversaw Department of Defense nuclear programs and the Department of Energy’s national security programs. Later she’d had senior positions in the Department of Energy.
NTI had gotten a lot of help from President Obama during his administration and probably vice versa. They both had declared a commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons. It was clear soon enough that NTI would be getting no help from the Trump administration toward this end.
With Donald Trump as President and Ernest Moniz as CEO of NTI and not much prospect of collaboration between them, what now for NTI?
Education could now get more attention. It was already part of NTI’s mission, education of us in the public, of course, but perhaps also of those of our elected leaders who might think they had something to learn about this nuclear business. If there were any.
Something else NTI had long been committed to was “building political will” to eliminate nuclear weapons. This could be seen as related to “education,” unless you think education is something that is supposed to be completely unrelated to action. I don’t. Action, or refraining from action, should be wise and informed, in my opinion. Which is different from being “expert,” isn’t it?
By now, NTI had also developed working relationships with several international organizations and institutions. NTI might try to work more with them now.
Maybe also focus more on young people.
NTI had already gotten a start on working with young people. In 2014, the year Russia invaded and occupied Crimea, NTI had started up a Younger Generation Task Force on Ukraine and Euro-Atlantic Security. In 2015, with the support of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and other international organizations, this group became the Younger Generation Leadership Network on Euro-Atlantic Security. Groups of younger people from the United States, Europe, and Russia who had been identified somehow as promising leaders would be sponsored to have meetings every few months in different cities in the Euro-Atlantic area. The hope was that younger people who weren’t former Cold Warriors or too set in their thinking might be able to discover ways to “reduce tensions” and improve relations among countries still in the grip of Cold War thinking.
Worth a shot, I’d say. Though finding the right young people, the leaders of the future, could be challenging. Also, I don’t think we older people should get in the habit of waiting for the young people to pull our fat out of the fire.
Internationally, there was in 2017 still plenty of interest in eliminating nuclear dangers, especially after the election of President Trump. You could infer this from, among other things, the fact that on July 7, 2017, six months into the Trump administration, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a new treaty called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW. It prohibited the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. It prohibited assisting anyone else in any of these activities. Any nuclear armed state joining the treaty would agree to an established and time-bound framework for negotiations leading to the verified and irreversible elimination of its nuclear weapons. No NWS did join it.
Negotiations toward the TPNW had begun in earnest in the United Nations during the Obama Administration, led by many non-governmental groups, prominent among them the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. ICAN had been established by IPPNW, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. A young person, Beatrice Fihn, a Swede who was 32 years old, had been made Executive Director of ICAN in 2014.
IPPNW was the group to which George Lee Butler had given his astonishing Geiringer Oration in 1997. The Geiringer Oration was the speech in which this former Commander in Chief of our Strategic Air Command argued that the goal must be “the complete elimination of nuclear weapons” because, argued the man who had been the CINC of the military branch in charge of delivering our nuclear weapons on the chosen targets, elimination was the only goal that made sense.
In 2017, in the United Nations General Assembly, 122 countries voted to adopt the text of the treaty. One voted against, the Netherlands. The Netherlands was a member of NATO. Singapore abstained and 69 nations didn’t vote, including all the Nuclear Weapon States and all the other NATO states. Who were going to vote the way the United States did, no doubt about that.
Everyone now agreed that killing civilians intentionally would violate international humanitarian law. By now, other weapons of war that would inescapably kill civilians had been outlawed: cluster munitions, land mines, biological and chemical weapons. Nuclear weapons, which would also inescapably kill civilians, hadn’t been so far.
Soon 86 nations had “signed” the TPNW, a next step. For the treaty to “enter into force” in international law, fifty nations would have to “ratify” it. (That would, it turned out, happen quickly, as these things go, by 2021, the year of NTI’s twentieth anniversary, also the year Trump left office.)
The Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons didn’t get into the details of just how elimination would be achieved. The hope seemed to be that a simple and unambiguous treaty that made the weapons illegal, if ratified by a great many nations, would catalyze a movement to eliminate the weapons in the nations dragging their feet. Among them, all the nations that had nuclear weapons.
No Nuclear Weapon State had expressed any interest in signing the treaty, let alone in ratifying it, now or, the Trump administration had said, ever. That wouldn’t keep the treaty from “entering into force” in international law if enough other countries ratified it. But it could keep the treaty from doing much, or anything, to eliminate nuclear weapons. You can’t “force” a country to give up its nuclear weapons, can you?
Some commentators were worried that the TPNW could weaken any motivation the Nuclear Weapon States might have to get going finally in meeting their obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That was the article of the NPT that required the NWS to begin “immediately” to engage in “good faith negotiations” toward “complete disarmament.” The NWS countries sure hadn’t done this so far. The NTP had entered into force in 1970. So not for the last forty-seven years.
The International Campaign against Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
After Trump took office in 2017, NTI had noticed increasing “polarization” in the “international non-proliferation and disarmament community” that threatened the viability of the NPT. In 2018, NTI launched something called the Global Enterprise to Strengthen Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. Its aim was to overcome the polarization and help identify practical steps that countries might take to strengthen the NPT, should those good faith negotiations ever get going. There was still no sign that any of the NWS had any inclination to get going with them. It certainly didn’t seem to be on President Trump’s agenda.
On November 5, 2018, President Trump reinstated the US sanctions against Iran that had been lifted after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was ratified in the Obama administration and Iran’s compliance with its terms verified. Most of the other countries who had signed the JCPOA said they would continue to observe its terms. Iran said it would too. For now.
Later, Trump announced new sanctions on Iran. Since we were no longer part of the JCPOA, these were just sanctions by us, not by the United Nations.
In 2019, the Nuclear Threat Initiative established a Global Health Index that you could say went with the Nuclear Security Index it had established in in 2012. The GHI would be part of the broader mission NTI now had to defend against biological weapons and pandemics. Pandemics weren’t and weapon and wouldn’t be started on purpose, I should think. But you could also think that about a nuclear exchange.
Less than a year after NTI established its Global Health Index, the need for measures to deal with pandemics became obvious. At the beginning of 2020, a pandemic caused by a novel virus called SARS CoV-2 took hold in China and begun to spread around in the world.
Not long at all after the pandemic began in 2020, in a wonderful development, scientists in the United States developed very effective vaccines that were made freely available to U.S. citizens, though not to people in other countries. In the U.S., some citizens who were supporters of ex-President Trump refused to get the vaccines, if you can believe that. Or to wear masks. They said that wearing masks meant you were anti-Trump. Trump had said so. I guess that made it true for them in spite of the evidence.
If you want to take chances with your own life, I think that’s your own business. But with things like this lethal virus, if you get infected by it, you give it another chance to mutate and become even more dangerous to the people it infects next. So by not getting vaccinated, you aren’t increasing only your own risk. You are increasing mine and my friends’ and family’s too. And everybody’s friends’ and family’s. What makes it okay to do that?
Later, in 2022, after Trump was out of office, NTI helped establish in the World Bank something called the Pandemic Preparedness Fund. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had been established at the end of World War II to help with reconstruction in the countries badly damaged in the war. The Pandemic Preparedness Fund was to help low- and middle-income countries prevent and deal with pandemics.
I thought the Pandemic Preparedness Fund was a good idea. It was quickly clear that the viruses that cause pandemics don’t respect the opinions of political leaders or international borders. Any more than nuclear weapons do. Or global warming.
“Sovereignty” means nothing to them.
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.
You Might Want to Know will take a break in the week of Thanksgiving, resuming the following week. I’m thankful for my intrepid readers.