Donald Trump Will Soon Have New Ways to Start a Nuclear War

The following story is co-published with Joe Cirincione’s Substack.

A version of this article was originally published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Sept. 11. You can read the entire article on the Bulletin’s website.

A new nuclear policy is taking shape in secret, crafted by a small group of Pentagon officials, that will give President Donald Trump more ways to start a nuclear war. Little is known about the strategic nuclear review now under way in the Trump administration, but officials’ comments suggest that it may bring back one of the most dangerous policies of the Cold War: the proliferation of battlefield nuclear weapons and their early use in a conventional war.

In the 1950s, a revolution occurred in military thinking about nuclear weapons. Rather than keeping the most destructive bombs ever invented as weapons of last resort in only the most extreme situations, military leaders began to see them as weapons usable in conventional conflicts, particularly in Europe.

Military services eager to acquire what they believed were the weapons of the future, coupled with corporations eager to develop them, led to the rapid production of atomic munitions for every conceivable military purpose. The Navy had nuclear torpedoes and depth charges; the Army had nuclear artillery and short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles; the Air Force got nuclear air-to-air missiles and multiple types of air-dropped bombs. By the early 1960s, the U.S. military even deployed small “backpack nukes,” known as Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, designed to be carried by one or two soldiers, as well as what might be the oddest of all: a nuclear “bazooka” called the Davy Crockett recoilless gun that fired a small nuclear weapon about a mile.

This nuclear insanity led to a world with almost 70,000 nuclear weapons at its peak in the late 1980s, the vast majority of which were possessed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Mass protests and a generation of wiser leaders led to sharp reductions in these arsenals. At first, the reductions primarily concerned long-range strategic weapons that could span the oceans. But massive reductions in short-range weapons soon followed.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush unilaterally cut 14,000 of these so-called tactical weapons, denuclearizing the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy surface fleet. In all, the United States cut tactical nuclear weapons by 90%, down to about 200 today. Russia mostly followed suit, though it retained a larger arsenal. The two nuclear superpowers settled into a familiar triad of strategic weapons deployed primarily on long-range, land-based missiles, submarines and bombers.

The new review looks to resurrect these failed policies of the past.

A review nobody will see

Early indications suggest that the nuclear strategy review the Pentagon is conducting will call for new weapons to fill every niche of the so-called escalatory ladder. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby explained in a speech in August, the main point of the review is “adding more options.” This means President Trump, who already has sole, unfettered authority to launch thousands of nuclear weapons on a moment’s notice, will soon have more types of weapons he could choose to launch.

The idea, developed in the nuclear posture review conducted during the first Trump administration, is to erase the divide between conventional forces and nuclear forces. Although the United States has long maintained so-called tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use, including the air-dropped B-61 bomb and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, new weapons must be added, proponents claim, to close supposed “deterrence gaps” and reduce a president’s fear of “going nuclear.”

The logic, nuclear hawks contend, is that by reducing the barriers to nuclear use, adversaries will not challenge the United States regionally, knowing that they would lose at every rung of the escalation ladder. They call this war-fighting strategy “escalation management.”

This strategy is poorly developed, and Colby’s talk did not help. It was meandering, confused and jumbled, but a few points stand out.

First, despite the numerous weaknesses that the disastrous Iran war has exposed in the U.S. armed forces and military leadership, Colby insists that “the modernization of our nuclear deterrent is the single most important initiative for the American military.”

Colby added that “we have to have a nuclear strategy […] that’s connected to our conventional force strategy.” Although “the goal here is to deter and avoid” a large-scale conflict, Colby implies that the best way to do that is to build more nuclear weapons, new types of nuclear weapons and couple them with new doctrines that would allow their use early in a conventional war. The point, he says, is that the enemy has “got to believe there’s some sense in which we would use” them. Colby even harks back to the 1960s “flexible response” doctrine developed when the United States still had thousands of nuclear weapons in Europe and Asia ready to use.

Finally, Colby said the review will be kept secret: “[T]his is not designed to be a public-facing review.” It will be kept internal to the Defense Department. Unlike previous nuclear posture reviews, this one is not an interagency process. Instead, it is being run by a small number of Pentagon officials, who do not plan on making the results of the review public. Referring to the Cold War era, Colby said that “NSC 68, the most famous document of that period, was not declassified, I think, until the 1970s.” This memo, presented to President Harry Truman in 1950, was the first document to detail a strategy of containment of the Soviet Union after World War II. Citing security concerns from a new era of “great power conflict,” Colby claims that we can no longer “openly talk about your military capabilities, your military problems, your military strategy in a very detailed way.”

But this secrecy is an authoritarian model of governance.

A handful of officials, probably helped by some contractor consultants, will decide policy on what the undersecretary says is the nation’s highest military priority. The press and the public will be forced to divine the new strategy from whatever pieces are released. Like so many other Trump administration initiatives, this policy is shielded from the normal democratic process of congressional oversight or even basic public information.

Follow the money

Procurement requests to support a U.S. policy of nuclear diversification will yield some clues about the new strategy and provide an opportunity both to force the release of more information and to resist the re-adoption of obsolete nuclear war-fighting doctrines.

This dangerous transition is already underway. The first Trump administration pushed through the deployment of the W76-2 warhead for the Trident ballistic missiles carried on strategic submarines. In contrast to the massive 455-kiloton W88 warheads on most of these missiles, one or two of the 20 missiles on each of the 14 deployed subs now carry this atomic warhead with an 8-kiloton yield, about half the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The idea is that a president would be more willing to use a small nuclear weapon than a huge city-killer.

The Biden administration failed to stop their deployment. Biden officials also raced ahead with the massive, unnecessary $2 trillion set of programs to replace every weapon in the strategic triad. Rather than develop a more rational and restrained policy, they greenlit proposals to build other new, more usable nuclear weapons, now heading for deployment.

Such weapons include a new air-launched cruise missile with an adjustable yield and a new sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) that will begin the re-nuclearization of the Navy’s surface fleet for the first time since the end of the Cold War. The Trump review will undoubtedly bless these weapons, perhaps increase their buy, and even recommend additional ones. Analysts and Congress should be on the lookout for budget requests for the research and development of such new weapons.

Not a surprise

Defense officials and contractors had already charted the course for which Colby now tries to provide a strategic justification. It was clearly laid out in the Project 2025 report developed by Heritage Foundation nuclear advocates during the last presidential campaign. As I warned at the time in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “If this hawkish political coalition gets its way in November, the scope, pace, and cost of U.S. nuclear weapons programs would increase all at once.”

Since then, these hawks have solidified the so-called “bipartisan consensus for nuclear modernization” by bringing former Biden officials into their fold. Democratic former defense officials Madelyn Creedon and Vipin Narang joined longtime nuclear weapons advocates Franklin Miller, Eric Edelman and Keith Payne to endorse both the process, which they call a “close hold mini review” and that excluded the State Department and the National Security Council. They also called for an expanded nuclear arsenal: “That force must have the requisite flexibility, survivability, diversity, and size to pose the threat necessary to deter different foes, acting together or separately, under all circumstances,” they recently wrote in Real Clear Defense.

But they never explain exactly where and how these new weapons would be used. Or why these weapons will make the United States safer when almost every war game run on the use of tactical nuclear weapons rapidly escalates to global war. More recent war games involving artificial intelligence find that AI models escalate to global war 95% of the time. Nor do they say why more weapons will increase confidence in U.S. security assurances when the main cause of unease among U.S. allies is the behavior of an erratic, authoritarian president, not the lack of weapons.

In short, under the guise of supposedly strengthening deterrence, these nuclear weapons advocates provide the kind of babble that now passes for strategy in most of Washington. It is hard to imagine any weapon that would not be justified under this profound-sounding but ultimately empty rhetoric.

For example, these same advocates use the traditional “peace through strength” talking points to justify a Cold War-style buildup. Arms control is impossible, they claim, because “until and unless we deploy systems that deny Moscow’s strategy of nuclear coercion, Russia will not engage in a serious discussion,” adding that “there is very little insight into what would motivate a currently uninterested China from coming to the negotiating table.”

From this perspective of an increased confrontation, reducing nuclear weapons and nuclear budgets is seen as weakness; only a new nuclear build-up can lead to peace. The review must provide “the President with the widest possible range of options necessary to deter the range of plausible attacks Moscow and Beijing (and Pyongyang) are capable of threatening, separately or in concert.”

This is a recipe for disaster. More weapons, more types of weapons, new use doctrines that blur or erase the divide between conventional and nuclear war, and a rejection of nuclear diplomacy will significantly increase the risk of nuclear war.

It is no coincidence that one of the authors of this piece, Keith Payne, wrote an infamous Foreign Policy article in 1980 that proudly claimed that “victory is possible.” Payne then, as now, argued that the United States could win a nuclear war. It was a core part of his effort to push through the purchase and production of new nuclear weapons by the Ronald Reagan administration, claiming that to make deterrence credible, the United States must have the capability to fight and win a nuclear war.

What’s new is old

If the Trump administration and its supporters succeed in reviving and implementing discredited Cold War doctrines, the United States may be condemned to repeat the massive, wasteful, unnecessary and truly terrifying nuclear arms race of the 1980s.

It is not too late, however, to begin a determined campaign to expose the dangers of this nuclear consensus, confront those supporting it, shine a spotlight on the funding analysts and their institutes get from nuclear weapon corporations, provide members of the new Congress next year with analysis and arguments, develop new expert and advocacy policies that can guide a post-Trump administration and train a new generation of experts who can join that administration without capitulating to the entrenched nuclear bureaucracy.

Some of this pushback has already begun. Bloomberg opinion columnist Andreas Kluth warns that “tactical nukes are a gateway drug to Armageddon.” Any conflict could quickly escalate into a nuclear war. “Adding tactical nukes back into the arsenals and war plans of the U.S. or any power is the wrong answer to today’s conflicts.”

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, also opposes this shift. “The changes would mark a stark shift toward an embrace of nuclear warfighting.”

Perhaps the most complete rebuttal to this new strategy comes in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs. “The country already has a vast and diverse enough supply of nuclear weapons to unleash devastation on an adversary in the case of a nuclear attack,” argues Council on Foreign Relations scholar Erin Dumbacher. “The purpose of nuclear deterrence is not to have an answer for every weapon in an adversary’s arsenal, but to avoid crossing the nuclear threshold in the first place.”

Dumbacher is correct. The American public will need many more voices and new collective efforts to erect more barriers to nuclear war, not give a president more options for starting one.