Trump Is Triggering a New Nuclear Weapons Race

In Trump 2.0 America, there is much to fear, ranging from social program funding cuts coupled with the destruction of federal agencies, to potential soaring consumer prices combined with a recession, to masked federal agents seizing people (no citizens as yet) in their homes or on the streets and making them disappear, to the effort to erase racial and sexual minorities, to the future one's children or grandchildren may face in a country with an increasingly fascist and authoritarian government.  Add to the list, as laid out in a very long piece in Politico Magazine is a new nuclear weapons race among former U.S. allies spurred on in part that the realization that America is no longer a reliable ally who will honor its defense treaty obligations.  Just as the Felon's tariff war has upended the world economy, so too have statements by the Felon and his henchmen - think Vance and Rubio - that have insulted Asian and European nations and suggested that when push comes to shove America may not honor its common defense agreements.  Hence countries from German, Poland, Japan and South Korea are beginning to discuss building their own nuclear arms defenses.  Here are article highlights:

In his first presidential term, shortly before heading off to what would become an infamous 2018 summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump called nukes “the biggest problem in the world” and summed up for reporters what he hoped to accomplish: “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.” Trump has repeatedly sounded the theme in his second term as well, warning over and over of “World War III.”

So it’s more than a little curious to consider that, in less than three months as president, Trump has already set in motion the opposite trend: potentially the fastest and most dangerous acceleration of nuclear arms proliferation around the world since the early Cold War.

The new nuclear powers aren’t just the rogue nations that have long been the focus of U.S. concern, countries like Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, the nations considering going nuclear are longtime U.S. allies, from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia. Faced with the threat of U.S. withdrawal from its defense commitments, more and more countries are now openly talking about embracing the bomb — and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.

Nor is there any evidence that in the flurry of activity marking what Trump has called “the most successful” start of any presidency in U.S. history, his administration has even begun reckoning with the implications of these seemingly contradictory policies.

“I’ve heard it’s a pure ghost town,” said Matt Costlow, who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy in Trump’s first term. “There’s just no one there. And the staff that is there is spread so thin it’s causing this paralysis.” As a result, he adds, “I don’t know that the Trump administration yet has a set view on the desirability of allies going nuclear. I think there’s a mix of views.”

Yet it’s clear that Trump’s signaling of a global drawdown of the U.S. defense umbrella has also produced an accelerated trend toward building — or at least considering deploying — nuclear weapons. Potential U.S. adversaries as well as allies say they are puzzled by the fact that no one in the Trump administration seems willing or able to grapple with the issue.

In Beijing, Chinese officials are growing worried that “regional security is fragmenting and eventually they’ll have to deal with more nuclear or ‘nuclear-latent’ countries in Asia,” said Francesca Giovannini, head of the Project on

Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who met with Chinese officials in late March. The problem, she said, is that the Chinese “really have zero idea of who he will appoint for arms control dealings. The Trump people don’t have the expertise in place to make decisions.”

One senior official who was just confirmed by the Senate, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, has been a leading and often strident voice in pressing European and Asian allies to beef up their own defenses. Last year Colby told the Yonhap News Agency that South Korea was going to have to take “primary, essentially overwhelming, responsibility” for its own defense and added that Washington should not sanction Seoul if it decides to go nuclear.

In his Senate testimony in March, Colby also said that Trump believes Taiwan needs to boost its defense spending from under 3 percent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product to deter a war with China — a hike that Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai called “impossible.”

Many U.S. allies now have a sense that Trump is abandoning the entire postwar global system and casting the world back into a vicious scramble for power in which the biggest powers get to dominate their regions and the smaller countries fend for themselves. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but said as much in a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, when he effectively conceded that Washington’s hegemonic global stature had been “an anomaly.”

“The message coming from the U.S. is that Trump’s foreign policy is all about spheres of influence. Russia can have Ukraine. China can have Taiwan,” said Karl Friedhoff, an expert in East Asian security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

As a result, some national security experts say this could be turning into the most unstable period since the early Cold War — an unstable period that could have a lot more nukes in a lot more places.

The danger posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century is shaping up to be a very different threat than it was in the 20th century.

For decades during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up massive arsenals of nuclear missiles that could be launched from the air, ground or sea. The destructive power of those weapons led the two nations to conclude a series of arms control agreements that eventually reduced the size of those arsenals.

Then, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, there was a concern that the breakup of the Soviet Union would result in loose nukes and newly independent post-Soviet states being armed with nuclear weapons. As a result, three former Soviet republics — Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — were pressured into relinquishing the weapons stationed on their territories. In 1998, President Bill Clinton made an anguished plea to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to test a bomb; after Sharif refused, Clinton imposed sanctions. Finally, in the mid-90s the Clinton administration pushed successfully to extend the NPT from 25 years to an indefinite term. Among the nations that ultimately gave up active nuclear weapons programs: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Italy, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Yugoslavia.

Today, largely as a result of all this frenetic diplomacy led by Washington, there are just nine nuclear powers in the world, as there have been for decades: the United States, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and most recently, North Korea.

Yet increasingly, nuclear weapons are being sought by countries that aren’t global superpowers but instead face threats from neighbors or regional rivals, such as Russia in Europe, or Iran in the Middle East. That means the nuclear equation is increasingly a region-by-region strategic puzzle with global ramifications.

Here’s some of what that looks like.

In Germany — a country where even discussing the bomb used to be a political third rail — the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, didn’t rule out the idea of developing one in a March interview. Merz also said Berlin should start talks about expanding the French and British nuclear deterrents to Europe, and he suggested Germany may finally be ready to go along with France’s on-again, off-again push for strategic autonomy from the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella; on March 18 he said France will deploy its own Rafale fighter jets equipped with supersonic nuclear warheads along its border with Germany in 2035.

And in Poland, a NATO front-line nation, Prime Minister Donald Tusk in March became that country’s first leader to hint at going nuclear, saying in a speech his nation should “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” He also suggested that Ukraine made a mistake by giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, leaving itself vulnerable to Russia.

As for Ukraine, which feels threatened with abandonment by Washington in the face of Russia’s aggression, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has openly talked about reestablishing a nuclear deterrent. . . . . “Say you’re Zelenskyy and you’re being forced into unsatisfactory peace with Russia without good security guarantees, what’s your best bet?” said Daniel Serwer of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Could the Ukrainians technically do this? Sure. Look what they’ve done driving the war. They know their business. They’ve handled a lot of nuclear material. They have good physicists and really good engineers. It’s not beyond Polish, German, Japanese or Taiwanese capabilities either.”

And in the long run a French guarantee of extended nuclear deterrence would not suffice for many European states. “Would the Poles see it as credible? Not a chance. It’s not likely the Germans would either,” said Roberts, who foresees a future of new regional groupings of nuclearized states, including the Nordic countries.

In the Middle East, experts believe Iran has been backed into a strategic corner since Israel decimated its proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that its leaders are now more motivated than ever to build a bomb. . . . Iran has raced to develop its program, and current assessments estimate that Iran is close to producing weapons-grade uranium and is only months, not years, away from completing a nuclear bomb.

Both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have indicated they would duplicate Iranian nuclear capabilities if Tehran got a bomb. Turkey will begin operating its Russia-built Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — its first — this year. And numerous reports over the years have indicated that the Saudis may have a secret diplomatic understanding with Pakistan under which Riyadh could quickly obtain a nuclear weapon from Islamabad, which developed its own bomb in the 1990s with Saudi financial backing. (Saudi Arabia denies such an understanding.)

But since his first administration, Trump and senior defense officials also have been pushing Asian allies hard to build up their own defenses. As a result, in South Korea and even Japan — where building a bomb was once unthinkable after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — there is a new willingness to embrace nuclear weapons in some form. . . . since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we’ve seen a total wake-up call in Japan about what kind of additional military power to possess,” said Junjiro Shida, a national security expert at Meio University on Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed.

In a statement last fall, Ishiba proposed an “Asian version of NATO” that must “specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”

South Korean politicians have gone further. In January — a week before Trump’s inauguration — South Korea’s politically embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said for the first time that his country might consider building nuclear weapons in the face of mounting threats from nuclearized North Korea. Yoon has since been ousted after being impeached for declaring martial law last year. But even his likely successor, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea — which once stoutly opposed nukes — has not ruled this out.

“There is growing doubt among allies and partners about whether the United States will meet its defense commitments when the chips are down,” said Eric Brewer, the former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “But there are a lot of other systemic factors driving countries to talk about developing nuclear weapons. One is the deteriorating regional security environments. In Europe, [you have] Russia’s growing nuclear arsenal and threat. In Asia you have the growing North Korean and Chinese nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East you have Iran at the nuclear threshold. The other factor is the absence of cooperation among great powers.

But as Costlow and others point out, just a willingness to broach the prospect of going nuclear could be something of a Pandora’s box.

“I compare it to uranium enrichment: The first 20 percent is actually the hardest hurdle to overcome. The last 80 percent doesn’t take much time,” Costlow said. “For some of these countries just the fact that they’re now talking about becoming a potential nuclear state is the toughest hurdle.”

And, he added, they’re starting to clear it.