I invited Bob Holley on the podcast to discuss the article he recently published here, Fracturing the Security Map, warning that the return of Donald Trump, coupled with Ukraine’s defeat, could spark a stampede to redraw the world’s nuclear security arrangements.
Discussed in the podcast
This is the remarkably prescient article by John Measheimer I mentioned: The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent
America First
I’ve been thinking about this problem since the first Trump presidency. I’ve explicated my own arguments about this risk in these and other articles:
Five Alarm Fire: The 118th Congress is destroying the world our grandparents built.
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—American statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now ushering into being.
“[T]he US is basically making the case to all states that they should try as hard as they can to develop nuclear weapons,” writes the war historian Phillips O’Brien … There is nothing wrong with his logic. His observations are correct and so is his reasoning. But the same logic applies to every other power in the world that would prefer not to suffer Ukraine’s fate.
The United States is pursuing a feckless, shortsighted policy that will lead to moral disgrace, generational shame, global nuclear proliferation, and an uncontrolled, multipolar nuclear arms race. We’re not pursuing it deliberately. It isn’t what we mean to do. But we could not be pursuing this policy more industriously if we had dedicated all the resources of our federal bureaucracy to the goal.
America First means nuclear war. The inevitable end point of losing the world's trust is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation:
… Here’s where a devout cadre of Trump’s supporters jump in on Twitter and say to me, “Great! All these freeloaders can start paying for their own defense!”
No. That’s not what’s going to happen. No single country can conceivably match the power of the full NATO alliance. That’s why we had it.
It would be a catastrophe if every country with the ability to do it acquired the Bomb. Never mind whether they would use them in anger, it would multiply the risk of an accident, which we already know is insanely high.
But they’re going to to do it if we keep this up. Any American who owns a gun, even though rationally they grasp that fewer Americans would die if there were no guns in America, should understand the calculation other countries are now apt to make. Is it a rational thing for the world to do? No. Rationally, the world will be, objectively, less safe if everyone acts on that impulse.But the world isn’t a rational place. People want safety for themselves, even if it means putting the world at greater risk. The inevitable end point is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. What “America First” means, in the end, is “Nuclear war.”
If you missed it the other day, here is the case for believing that under these circumstances, the risk of an accidental nuclear war would be insanely high.
If you’re unconvinced by this case, you may be suffering from one of these common cognitive errors.
It’s Happening
This is no longer theoretical. We’re not discussing an abstruse theory in international relations, or something that might happen. It’s happening now. The news is scarcely being reported in the United States, crowded out by discussion of Trump’s Cabinet picks, but as soon as the election was called for Trump, the world began to change:
“NATO or Nukes.” Why Ukraine’s nuclear revival refuses to die:
Addressing a European Council meeting in Brussels on October 17, Zelensky invoked Ukraine’s decision to surrender nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security commitments from nuclear states—the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia—recorded in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. (China and France pledged similar security assurances in separate letters.) The Budapest Memorandum commitments failed spectacularly to prevent Russian aggression against Ukraine. So, how does Ukraine provide for its security? Zelensky outlined two options: “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then it will be a defense for us, or Ukraine will be in NATO. NATO countries are not at war today. All people are alive in NATO countries. And that is why we choose NATO over nuclear weapons.”
On the same day, Zelensky revealed that he had delivered a similar message to presidential candidate Donald Trump during his visit to the United States in late September and added that Trump responded that his reasoning made sense … the international community cannot blame [Zelensky] for stating the obvious: NATO members, under their nuclear umbrella, are at peace while Ukraine is at war. Russia and NATO exercise restraint vis-à-vis each other based on a shared understanding that a direct conventional confrontation between two nuclear-armed adversaries would carry the inherent risk of nuclear escalation and possibly a nuclear war. Russia does not exhibit a similar restraint toward a non-nuclear, non-allied Ukraine. To add insult to injury, Russia, with its nuclear saber-rattling, has succeeded in partly influencing the timing and conditions of Western arms supplies to Ukraine, hampering Ukraine’s defense effort. In short, peace is the prerogative of those who are fortunate to benefit from nuclear deterrence. The unfortunate ones must suffer war.
“I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God.”
Could Zelensky use nuclear bombs? Kyiv could rapidly develop a rudimentary weapon similar to that dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 to stop Russia if the US cuts military aid:
Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. …
With no time to build and run the large facilities required to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine’s nuclear reactors. Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite having given up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996.
… The paper, which is published by the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, has been shared with the country’s deputy defense minister and is to be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukraine’s ministers for defense and strategic industries. It is not endorsed by the Kyiv government but sets out the legal basis under which Ukraine could withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the ratification of which was contingent on security guarantees given by the US, UK and Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum. The agreement stated that Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for the promise of protection. “The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reconsideration of the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994,” the paper states.
…. Trump has pledged to cut US military aid unless Kyiv submits to peace talks with Putin. Bryan Lanza, a Trump adviser, has already said that Ukraine will have to surrender Crimea. This week Donald Trump Jr. taunted Zelensky, posting on X: “You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.”1
… “You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation,” said Valentyn Badrak, director of the center that produced the paper. “There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags.” Badrak is from Irpin, where occupying Russians tortured and murdered civilians, and he was hunted by troops with orders to kill him.
Western experts believe it would take Ukraine at least five years to develop a nuclear weapon and a suitable carrier, but Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year from building its own ballistic missiles.2 “In six months Ukraine will be able to show that it has a long-range ballistic missile capability: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers,” Badrak said.
Signatures collected in favor of stationing nuclear weapons in Latvia.
The Future of the Zeitenwende: Scenario 5—Poland Becomes a Nuclear Power:
… Given that Poland would have to fear Russian preemptive action, especially in a world where Washington had withdrawn from NATO, Poland’s best bet would be to hide its nuclear ambitions for as long as possible. In this regard, Poland would likely aim to present the world with a fait accompli once its nuclear weapons program has started to bear fruit.
Interview with Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski:
“If America cannot come together with Europe and enable Ukraine to drive Putin back, I fear that our family of democratic nations will start to break up. Allies will look for other ways to guarantee their safety. They’ll start hedging. Some of them will aim for the ultimate weapon, starting off a new nuclear race.”
Center-right leader Weber supports Macron’s call for European nuclear deterrent.
Germany debates nuclear weapons, again. But now it’s different.
Germany and a European nuclear deterrence capability
With Russia inching forward in Ukraine, the US threatening to flake out as an ally and the rest of Europe in a state of paralyzed shock over Donald Trump, Germany should waste no time in pulling together a nuclear arsenal. In a nutshell, that’s the position of Germany’s atomic hawks, who have been screaming from the rooftops this week that the clock is ticking to take action before Germany finds its collective self once again staring down the barrel of der Russe (the Russian).
To be sure, Germany’s nuclear debate isn’t new. In recent years it’s come up again and again. But this time, the debate is much more urgent. “We’re running out of time,“ Maximilian Terhalle, a German security and military expert who has spent years pushing his country to reconsider its stance on nukes, tells the Bulletin. … Putin could see an opening to test the US’s resolve to protect “every inch” of NATO territory as soon as Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025 by moving into Estonia or another Baltic nation (or as Trump has been known to call them, the “Balkans.”)
Iran reaffirms stance against nuclear weapons amid regional tensions:
In recent months, there have been calls from certain figures within Iran to reconsider Khamenei’s fatwa in response to Israel’s nuclear capabilities and escalating tensions. In May, Kamal Kharrazi, Chairman of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that Iran could reassess its position if Israel were to threaten Iran with its nuclear weapons. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also stated that such a threat could lead regional countries to reconsider their nuclear stance.
Saudi Arabia will build a nuclear bomb “as soon as possible” if Iran succeeds in developing its own.
Turkey needs to acquire nuclear arms to stop Israel, urges Erdoğan’s chief fatwa giver:
Hayrettin Karaman, the 90-year-old Islamic jurist and chief fatwa (religious edict) giver for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a prominent ideologue for the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood, has said Turkey must pursue nuclear capabilities to counter Israel and establish deterrence against its adversaries.
In an article published September 8 in the Islamist Yeni Şafak daily, Karaman argued that Turkey’s current efforts are insufficient to stop Israel. He urged that “either the Islamic world must unite and collaborate with China and Russia, or Turkey must move forward by acquiring nuclear warheads and weapons.”
Erdoğan’s nuclear itch. Why Turkey’s nuclear program is a threat to regional stability and the international nonproliferation regime:
The year 2023 is an important one for observers of Turkey’s nuclear program, as that year is when the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey’s first, is scheduled to come online, making Turkey’s ambitions more clear. The threat may very well come to pass as nothing but a threat. This rests upon the international community adopting several measures to reestablish confidence in the nonproliferation regime, something which looks unlikely at the moment but is necessary to prevent a new nuclear arms race. A nuclear Turkey would help realize Erdoğan’s dreams of a Pan-Turkic Empire. So long as Erdoğan continues on his revanchist path of returning Turkey to its Ottoman glory, the threat posed by Turkey gaining nuclear capabilities cannot be disregarded.
Taiwan must get serious about nuclear weapons:
Since its February 2022 invasion, Russia has repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation if NATO sends troops to Ukraine. Predictably, NATO has refrained from sending troops. Equally predictable is that the US would avoid sending troops to Taiwan if it believed the decision might lead to nuclear war. … Ukraine tried to deter Russia with conventional weapons, and it did not work. Instead of repeating Ukraine’s mistakes, Taiwan should learn from them. … Ukraine and Taiwan have no choice but to face their nuclear-armed adversaries alone. Their best chance of long-term survival is to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.
Trump’s comeback fuels nuclear debate in South Korea:
"In general, the more the Trump administration denigrates and neglects the alliance with the South and the more it shows signs of wanting to reach an arms control deal with North Korea that provides Pyongyang with nuclear weapons status, the more South Korea will entertain its intention of obtaining its own nuclear weapons.” … That concern will be heightened if, as has been speculated, Trump pursues an agreement with the North that bans its development of the long-range missiles—the kind of missiles that could be used to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons—in return for the West effectively accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. Such a deal would provide no assurances to South Korea, whose capital city is only 50 kilometers from the North Korean border.
Trump win fuels campaign for nuclear arms in South Korea:
“Mistrust of the U.S. is growing,” said Cheong, who founded the ROK Forum for Nuclear Strategy, a group of 50 analysts, former military officials and academics who share his view that South Korea should acquire nuclear arms. …In 2020, Trump ordered the withdrawal of around 12,000 US troops stationed in Germany, calling the European nation “delinquent.” “Germany’s not paying for it,” he said at the time. “We don’t want to be the suckers anymore.” Trump has similarly dismissed the US-South Korea alliance as an unnecessary drag … As president, he canceled joint military exercises between the two countries for being “tremendously expensive” and told aides that he wanted a “complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea”…
“Rhetorically, nuclear weapons are on the table,” said Mason Richey, a professor of politics and international relations at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “And that will be significantly affected by how the Trump administration approaches the alliance with South Korea and how it approaches the relationship with North Korea. In general, the more the Trump administration denigrates and neglects the alliance with the South and the more it shows signs of wanting to reach an arms control deal with North Korea that provides Pyongyang with nuclear weapons status, the more South Korea will entertain its intention of obtaining its own nuclear weapons.”
“So much has changed since the Ukraine war, with the nonproliferation regime once managed between China, Russia, and the US having been considerably weakened. Who will tell South Korea that it can’t have nuclear weapons for its own survival?”
Push for Seoul getting own nuclear arms gains steam after Trump win.
… “There are a lot of concerns about former President Trump having been re-elected,” the first-time lawmaker said. “Gaining nuclear potential is going to be a long game for South Korea. But I think we can and should try to get there faster.”
Retired three-star Army general Rep. Han Ki-ho, reputed as a leading military expert in the ruling party, went a step further and said South Korea getting nuclear arms may no longer be a choice given North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons program. “For South Korea’s survival, nuclear armament may be the only path left to us,” he said. Within the People Power Party, a National Assembly resolution urging the government to pursue nuclear arms as a means of North Korean nuclear deterrent is underway.
How Trump could push Japan, South Korea to go nuclear:
“If South Korea has nuclear weapons, Japan will surely have them,” [said] the prime minister’s advisor, who had recently returned from a visit to Korea. …Technically, while South Korea can move faster politically, Japan has the fissile material already in storage—the plutonium stockpile from reprocessed spent fuel—as well as a potential long-range delivery system in its H-2 and H-3 rockets. “We have to face the sheer reality of who is leading the US,” the former senior Foreign Ministry official concluded. “We cannot change that.”
The Inexorable Logic
Imagine that you are the defense minister of an American ally. When you open the newspaper today, this is what you see:
Russia and China: Two Countries, One Threat:
The combat deployment of 10,000 North Korean troops to the battlefield near Ukraine’s border has confirmed that Russia’s war of aggression is now a multi-theater global confrontation—China’s critical role in sustaining Putin’s war machine through the supply of dual-use goods, as well as drone and missile technology, and Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles and other armaments to Russia, make it hard to argue against the de facto existence of a four nation authoritarian axis. These developments should put paid to the notion that the theaters can be neatly separated.
Pyongyang’s active engagement in the conflict, in particular, is a turning point. Not only does the transfer of North Korean military personnel to Russia represent a major escalation, it also marks yet another failure of US deterrence. Whether in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, or the South China Sea, Moscow and Beijing seem increasingly keen to test US responses to their escalation. The deployment of troops to Eastern Europe by one of Moscow’s allies from Asia creates a precedent that defies residual assumptions from the Cold War era.
Trump’s secretary of defense pick is a wildly unqualified Fox News host.
The curious case of Tulsi Gabbard: Is she a Russian asset or a dupe?
What would you conclude?
The moments when an adversary is on the precipice of acquiring the Bomb, or a secure second-strike capability, are the most dangerous. That’s when the incentive to launch a first strike is the greatest. But rivals have incomplete information about each other’s capabilities, so the chances that one party will miscalculate, sparking a blood-soaked conventional war or a nuclear exchange, are enormous. Israel and Iran are the obvious example of this dynamic.
No one should console himself with the thought that the world will be safer when our allies, or former allies, acquire the Bomb. We don’t have the ability to say that friendly countries may have nuclear weapons but hostile ones may not. The demise of the NPT will even destabilize regions that are for now tolerably stable. A global proliferation cascade will ensue.
By electing Donald Trump, the United States initiated a de facto withdrawal from its treaty commitments and alliances around the globe. The effect of this will be much like that of the sudden collapse of the British or the Ottoman Empire. When empires suddenly collapse, they leave a security vacuum and chaos. There are no examples from history of such a thing proceeding peacefully.
There are now superpower-sized holes in the world’s security architecture. We will very likely see multiple regional nuclear arms races, under circumstances and in configurations the world has not seen before, as a consequence. This will be a world completely unlike the one every living American has known. Many Americans believe, wrongly, that the power configuration of the world and all that implies is simply the natural order, rather than a thing we built deliberately. For people like this, the ramifications of its destruction will no doubt come as a great shock.
We’re willingly embarking on a project to create precisely those circumstances most likely to give rise to terrible accidents and miscalculations. Even if the world’s luck holds, which is unlikely, we will live for the foreseeable future in a world where nuclear showdowns like the Cuban Missile Crisis regularly occur, but we will have no power to shape their outcome. No one will be looking for advice from their former security guarantor.
By the time we realize what we’ve thrown away, and what it meant to have it, it will be too late. We will be hostage to other nations’ fortunes. Our power to shape our own destiny, in the most fundamental of ways, will be gone.
Historians, if they survive, will be puzzled that we barely thought twice about it.
Donald Trump Jr. is one of the most contemptible men the United States has ever produced. Russians have raped Ukrainian children below the age of four.
I would not bet against Ukrainian ingenuity.
From America First to Nuclear War