Nuclear proliferationTrump’s U.S. could give up the fight to stop nuclear arms from spreading

By Malcolm M. Craig

Published 18 November 2016

With a few notable exceptions, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have generally tried to restrain if not reverse nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons came into existence. There were failures – Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea — but the overall thrust of global politics, under U.S. leadership, has been toward nonproliferation. The United States is far from the sole global arbiter of nuclear status, but Washington wields immense power on nuclear issues. This may change now as Trump, throughout his campaign, seemed unconcerned about the further spread of nuclear weapons. The nonproliferation regime is flawed, sometimes unfair, but ultimately functional. Under the Trump administration, however, the one nation that has done more to restrain proliferation than any other might yet destroy the entire fragile edifice.

With a few notable exceptions, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have generally tried to restrain if not reverse nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons came into existence. But in the era of Donald Trump, that history may count for nothing.

President-elect Trump apparently has little time for his country’s fragile nuclear weapons deal with Iran, and his alarmingly permissive statements about the wider proliferation of nuclear weapons fly in the face of U.S. nonproliferation policy since 1945.

U.S. presidents have been trying to contain the spread of nuclear weapons since the dawn of the atomic age. There were missteps along the way: Dwight Eisenhower’s ill-considered Atoms for Peace program ended up distributing nuclear technology around the world, contributing in particular to India’s pursuit of “the bomb,” which it eventually acquired in 1974.

Successive presidents – including Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon – failed to halt Israel’s undeclared nuclear program. Despite Jimmy Carter’s sincere efforts to restrain Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, an uptick in the Cold War in 1979-80 and the sheer determination of Pakistani leaders were too much to overcome.

Despite these failures, the overall thrust has been towards nonproliferation. The prospect of a West German bomb and China’s ascent to nuclear status in 1964 saw genuine moves towards an international nonproliferation regime, resulting in the landmark 1968 Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to this day the cornerstone of nuclear weapons control.

In the 1970s and 1980s, American leaders helped persuade Argentina and Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan that national nuclear programs were not in their interest. The anti-proliferation mood continued into the 1990s, as South Africa voluntarily dismantled its six bombs, while Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Ukraine all gave up their Soviet-era weapons under the Lisbon Protocol, which the US was directly involved in brokering.

U.S. nuclear weapons policy, then, has broadly tended towards antiproliferation. And while it’s far from the sole global arbiter of nuclear status, Washington wields immense power. But it seems Trump knows little of this history, and cares even less about it.