Headline
I just read the headline, “Trump authorizes immediate nuclear missile tests”. The first thing that came to mind was the old 1953 Bugs Bunny Cartoon. Bugs was on an assembly line, testing cannon shells. The shells came by on a conveyor belt, and Bugs took a hammer and banged on the top. If they didn’t explode, he chalked “DUD” on the side. “Just think”, he said, “In thirty years I can retire!!!”. It was funny – but not so much in a world entangled by the Cold War, with nuclear destruction hanging over all our heads.
So, I envision a gloomy Air Force enlisted man, climbing a ladder to the top of a Minuteman III missile in a Nebraska silo, hammer in one hand, chalk in the other. Then it dawned on me. Trump didn’t want to check the missiles. He wants to blow one up!
Thirty-Three Years
The United States hasn’t exploded a nuclear weapon since 1992, thirty-three years ago. George HW Bush was President (Dad, not Son). It was an underground test in the Nevada desert, where the only sign of detonation was the dust rising from the vibrating surface. We stopped nuclear testing after that, for several reasons. First, underground, underwater, or airburst on the surface, nuclear testing was horrible for the environment. Second, by taking “testing” off the table, it gave the US an advantage in nuclear weapon limitation talks. Third, we already had enough “test data” to know what worked, and what didn’t.
And finally, by 1993 computers progressed far enough that we could “model” the impacts of differing nuclear weapons. We no longer needed to actually set one off; the computers could give us all the information we needed to determine what changes to make on the “next generation” of weaponry.
Computational science has come a long way since 1993, the year I bought my first Apple PowerBook. That was a slow, gray-screened, limited tool. But it was a “laptop”!! I expect that nuclear modeling has advanced as well, making environment altering detonations totally unnecessary. So why, almost out of the blue, did President Trump ordered testing to resume?
Flexing
Donald Trump is nothing if not predictable. The United States is “flexing” our military muscle all over the world. We are blowing up boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, ostensibly because they are smuggling drugs. Dozens of people, maybe drug runners, maybe innocent fisherman, are dead. Trump is using the military in the streets of American cities, a “show of force” against crime, that’s a lot more show than force. And finally, Defense Secretary Hegseth is all “show”, demanding his Department be called “THE WAR DEPARTMENT”. He’s more worried about the “Warriors with Abs” then with real military preparedness.
So it should be no surprise that a President fixated on demonstrating strength, would want to use the ultimate weapons. He already dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan ( Massive Ordinance Air Black Bomb or colloquially, Mother of All Bombs) costing millions of dollars. This past year, he’s used several of the GBU-57 “bunker buster bombs” on Iran, at $3.5 million apiece.
But Trump has access to the most powerful arsenal in the world. How could he NOT want to set a few off, just to let the world know that he has the biggest – missiles. Besides, it fits his normal foreign policy position: unknowable, erratic, Quixotic, arbitrary. What goes for one Nation, say Israel, is completely different than another, like Ukraine. Trump intentionally wants to keep the world off balance with untenable positions: threatening China with 100% tariffs for example. So how could he not use the ultimate “Trump Card”, or at least let the world see that they still work?
The Cost
There is the obvious environmental cost of setting off a nuclear weapon. And there is the danger of “normalizing” nuclear weapons, reversing American policy of the last three decades. Recently, only North Korea has detonated nuclear weapons, and that was eight years ago. But if the United States opens the door, there’s no doubt that Russia, China, and perhaps other nuclear powers will feel required to join in .
That’s not good for the world. Other than outlaw states like North Korea, the world has stepped back from the nuclear edge at the height of the Cold War in the 1980’s. Now, Donald Trump wants us to “step up” to the edge again, all for his Presidential vanity.
Maybe we should give him the chalk and hammer.
