During his campaign, Trump called nuclear proliferation the “biggest problem” in the world. But he also said that Japan and South Koreamight want to get nukes of their own. He wouldn’t take nuking ISIS, or even Europe, off the table. But he’s also characterized himself as “highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely” to ever use nuclear weapons. This calculated ambiguity isn’t unusual for America’s presidents. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush left nuclear first strikes on the table, too.
But for a US president to talk so openly and frequently about using nuclear force is a clear break with history, says Frank Sauer, an international security researcher at the Bundeswehr University Munich and author of the book Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons. And it could be potently destabilizing in a world where nations’ nuclear doctrines are shaped more by posture than by policy.
Despite a few close calls, nuclear warheads haven’t been used in armed conflict for more than 70 years. But there’s controversy over the reason why. Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis, put it down to pure luck.
But
Nina Tannenwald, director of international relations at Brown University, argues that a taboo gradually emerged from the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This taboo created the shared expectation that using nuclear weapons again would be deeply, morally wrong. International relations professor and author of
The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons, T.V. Paul disagrees, arguing that it’s not a taboo but a tradition that’s driven by social and political pressures. And underlying both of these explanations is humankind’s deep-seated fear of going extinct, Sauer says.
While mutually assured destruction — the notion that any country launching nukes would likely also be destroyed by nukes — gets the most ink in terms of deterrence, these cultural and psychological deterrents play powerful roles.
Let’s be very clear: the president alone controls the nukes. There aren’t more checks and balances because our nuclear chain of command was built to speedily deliver mutually assured destruction. In fact, the only real check on the president’s nuclear authority is the election, writes nuclear history professor Alex Wellerstein in a recent blog post. “[D]on’t elect people you don’t trust with the unilateral authority to use nuclear weapons.”
That’s because if the US is attacked, time is precious: early warning teams only have three minutes to determine whether warnings of a missile attack are real. If it looks legitimate enough to take to the president, the president then has less than 12 minutes to open the nuclear briefcase (or “football”), review his tactical options, and authorize a nuclear strike. Or at least, 12 minutes is how long the White House has if a submarine deployed in the Western Atlantic were to fire on DC; if Russia were to launch a nuke from within its borders, there’s maybe 18 additional minutes to react. If the president hesitates, a nuke could hit the White House before the US has a chance to launch a counterstrike.
Still, many experts agree that mutually assured destruction can’t fully explain why no one is using their nukes. After all, the US didn’t use nuclear weapons against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, even though Iraq didn’t have any nuclear weapons to retaliate with.
International law isn’t a great deterrent, either. True, the United Nations Charter does ban military force except in self defense, and using nukes could possibly constitute a war crime. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 implicitly bans the five so-called nuclear weapon states — the US, the UK, Russia, France, and China — from attacking a non-nuclear party to the treaty. But even so, in 1996, the UN’s judicial branch ruled that it’s not illegal to use nukes to ward off an existential threat. It’s just not really legal, either.
Other nations do a better job at checking their leaders’ nuclear strength. China and India both pledged to not use nuclear weapons in a first strike. (India changed their policy in 2003 to let them retaliate with nukes against a chemical or biological weapons attack.) Russia walked back their own no-first-use policy in the 1990s, and the US doesn’t have one.
MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION CAN’T FULLY EXPLAIN WHY NO ONE IS USING THEIR NUKES
That’s where the nuclear taboo comes in. It lumps nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons into a category of weapons of mass destruction that are unusable precisely because they’re so powerful and hard to control, says Tannenwald, author of The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945.
The taboo stems from the wreckage of the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan during World War II. We still don’t know how many people were killed by the first blasts, probably between 150,000 and 250,000 in total. The death toll continued to rise over the next five years to nearly 350,000 people, with many dying of cancers from the radioactive fallout.
During his recent visit to Japan, President Obama called Hiroshima “the start of our own moral awakening.” That moral awakening has kept nations like the US from using nukes even as they stockpiled them, Tannenwald argues. The taboo casts nuclear weapons as untouchable, stigmatized tools that only a barbarian would use — shaping public opinion as well as world leaders’ personal conviction. After the bombing of Nagasaki, President Harry Truman reportedly called off any more nuclear attacks, saying, “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.”………
the thing about Trump’s tough nuclear talk is that even if he’s bluffing, this kind of saber rattling could drive more nations to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. Even in Germany, people were unsettled when Trump talked about withdrawing military support from NATO countries. The editor of the conservative German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungwrote an op-ed speculating that Germany should build its own nuclear arsenal……http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/11/13903336/donald-trump-nukes-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-legal-psychological-barriers
What’s standing between Donald Trump and nuclear war? The main barriers to using nuclear weapons are psychological, not legal, The Verge by Dec 11, 2016 When President-elect Donald Trump officially becomes the president of the United States in January, he will take complete control of America’s nuclear arsenal. Should he decide to start a nuclear war, there are no legal safeguards to stop him. Instead, a much less tangible web of norms, taboos, and fears has reined in US presidents since World War II. But as North Koreaescalates its nuclear weapons tests and the president-elect of the United States openly contemplates using nukes, experts worry that this fragile web could start to tear.
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