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Can Trump 2.0 defuse the nuclear threat? These Washington heavyweights fear not

Peter Hartcher, November 9, 2024 

Political and international editor

Bob Woodward is doing his best to remain optimistic in the face of an impending second Donald Trump presidency. “Don’t give up on America’s democracy!”

But when the topic turns to the president’s unique responsibility for US nuclear strategy, his sunny outlook grows dim.

“It’s frightening,” says the noted American journalist and close student of the last 10 US presidents. “We are all walking on eggshells,” Woodward tells me. “Trump is totally unpredictable, he never plans, he operates on instinct.”

Not necessarily because he fears that Trump will recklessly fire off atomic weapons but because he worries about Trump’s ability to deter other powers from doing so.

Woodward, whose initial fame was in breaking the Watergate stories with co-author Carl Bernstein, has interviewed Trump dozens of times over 35 years, and chronicled his political career in four books ripe with insider anecdotes.

Woodward was most impressed with Joe Biden’s management of the nuclear threat from Russia two years ago when Vladimir Putin was threatening to attack Ukraine with a tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapon. He sets out in detail in his new book, War, how Biden’s administration confronted Moscow, including a phone call from the US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu:

“It wouldn’t matter how small the nuclear weapon is,” Austin told Shoigu, according to the transcript of the call that Woodward obtained. “If you do this, it would be the first use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world in three-quarters of a century and it could set in motion events that you cannot control and we cannot control.”

The US would review all the self-imposed restraints it had imposed in supporting Ukraine’s war effort, Austin told him.

Separately, Biden called Xi Jinping to enlist his help. China’s economic support keeps Russia solvent through its war. So Xi’s opinion matters in the Kremlin.

“If Putin were to break the seal on nuclear use, that would be an enormous event for the world,” Biden told Xi, according to the book. China’s president agreed and undertook to warn Putin off. He did so publicly when he said: “Nuclear wars must not be fought.”

America’s Cold War-era plans for nuclear and conventional escalation with the Soviet Union were reworked and refitted for war with Putin’s Russia.

Woodward says he was shocked to learn that, during this episode, the US intelligence assessment of the risk that Putin would actually use a battlefield nuke had started at a 10 per cent chance but peaked at 50 per cent. Putin, of course, ultimately did not act on his threat.

The Biden administration showed “unique, steady, purposeful, informed leadership” in handling the risk from Russia, says Woodward. “It’s a road map for how you avoid a nuclear catastrophe.”

He adds: “There is nothing steady and there is nothing purposeful in Donald Trump’s leadership. He’s focused on himself and his own instinct.”

…………………………………………………………………………..The concern about Trump rests on his chaotic and erratic method of decision-making and his personal preference for dictators over democrats – for America’s traditional enemies over its allies.

But there is a new factor that Trump will have to confront. “All of US Cold War nuclear strategy was bipolar – it was the US and the USSR,” Woodward says. “With China’s rapid nuclear build-up, strategy will have to be tripolar.”

So a president given to simplistic plans and impulses must deal with a whole new level of nuclear complexity for which neither he nor the US system is yet equipped. Woodward need not fear contradiction on this point: “This is such a dangerous time.”  https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/can-trump-2-0-defuse-the-nuclear-threat-these-washington-heavyweights-fear-not-20241108-p5kp0n.html

November 9, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA