Opinion | Donald Trump Can Pull Us Back From the Nuclear Brink

In the United States, only the president can decide whether to use nuclear weapons. It’s an extraordinary instance in which Mr. Trump’s decision-making power will be absolute. He will not need to consult Congress, the courts or senior advisers on when or how to use them. He will have a free hand to craft our nation’s nuclear posture, policy and diplomacy.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump commented on the peril posed by the rest of the world’s growing nuclear arsenals. His return to the White House offers new opportunities for him to steer America clear of those threats. His administration will need to act urgently and with creativity, all while also demonstrating the understanding that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to be brandished as a cudgel.

The leaders of China, Russia and the United States are in the midst of a new great-power competition, a global struggle for military, economic and geopolitical dominance. But not all aspects of this contest are zero-sum, especially in nuclear weapons matters. There are ample opportunities for all sides to improve their own national security conditions by staving off a costly arms race and dangerous confrontation.

Most Americans have never seen — or perhaps even contemplated — what it takes to be ready for nuclear conflict. Times Opinion gained rare, up-close access this summer to film what this looks like in the United States. Observing the missile launch procedures provided a glimpse at the inner workings of a warfighting machine that should never be set in motion.

The global nuclear balance is more tenuous in 2024 than it has been in decades.

“Tomorrow, we could have a war that will be so devastating that you could never recover from it,” Mr. Trump said in June. “Nobody can. The whole world won’t be able to recover from it.”

The last remaining major bilateral accord limiting the United States’ and Russia’s arsenals, New START, expires in just 14 months. And Russian leaders have rejected the Biden administration’s offers to discuss a new nuclear arms control framework, which follows the dismantling of other accords meant to lessen the risk of conflict. We are on the precipice of living in a world that has no restraints on how many nuclear weapons are deployed.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia continues to raise the specter of escalating his war on Ukraine to nuclear use. India and Pakistan have an estimated 170 nuclear weapons each but are expanding their arsenals. U.S. intelligence believes China plans to double by 2030 the size of its stockpile of an estimated 500 warheads, as it continues the most ambitious expansion and diversification of its weaponry in its history. North Korea has developed missiles designed to strike America. The war in Gaza threatens to expand into a wider regional conflict; Israel already has nuclear weapons and Iran is moving closer to building a bomb, risking a proliferation cascade throughout the Middle East.

The nuclear risk isn’t found only among America’s adversaries. Allies without nuclear aims are now seriously discussing whether they also need nuclear capability. The recently impeached South Korean president, Yoon Suk-yeol, has raised the possibility of building a bomb, and polls have shown that 70 percent of Koreans think the country should. If South Korea proceeds, experts assume Japan will as well. Germany is debating whether it should develop its own nuclear program, and Poland has sought a more active role in NATO’s nuclear sharing. Ukraine’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, has made his nation’s need for a nuclear weapon clear if the country isn’t granted NATO membership.

If Mr. Trump is serious about truly making America great again, this is one critical issue where he can make his mark. The United States spent the second half of the 20th century and into the next with a single stated goal when it came to nuclear weapons: to make the world safer from them. After its devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this aim was not a given — in the first several decades of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union amassed nuclear arsenals large enough to destroy the human race many times over. By the early 1960s, the Americans and Soviets appeared to be on a collision course toward nuclear war, armed with the most dangerous technology man has ever produced.

The Cuban Missile Crisis put both countries on a new path. In 1963, the superpowers agreed to the first treaty on nuclear testing. By 1968, many nations of the world had agreed in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to a grand bargain: In exchange for nonnuclear states forgoing such weapons, the nuclear states would work to get rid of theirs. Facing ever more public pressure, American leaders and diplomats would spend the next five decades leading the effort to set limits on the number of nuclear warheads deployed, as well as establish transparency and clear lines of communication. Shrinking the nuclear arsenal became a bipartisan, generational effort.

Today, nearly all of that work has unraveled.

It can’t be ignored that in his first term, Mr. Trump played a significant role in fostering at least some of the risk the world now faces. Yet, given the changed landscape, the United States will have no choice but to lead — something that, based on his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump appears to embrace.

In the past, Mr. Trump has said that he first appreciated the true danger of nuclear weapons after talking to an unlikely source: his uncle, an M.I.T. professor. In 1986, when he was still principally a New York real estate developer, Mr. Trump reached out to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which had just received a Nobel Peace Prize for its disarmament work. He hoped to arrange negotiations with the Soviets to lower the nuclear threat.

Now it will be the job of President Trump to pull the world back from the brink. It’s time to discuss what he and the United States should prioritize.

Visiting Hiroshima in 2016, President Barack Obama was optimistic enough to call on nations that possessed nuclear weapons to “have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”

Abolition is something the United States has not seriously considered — and cannot now afford to consider. With China’s unprecedented nuclear buildup underway, the world faces, for the first time, the reality of not just two but three nuclear superpowers. The bipolar strategic balance of the Cold War no longer holds. American diplomats have no choice but to figure out how to restart sustained arms control negotiations and lay the groundwork for future generations to complete the job of nuclear disarmament.

Mr. Trump’s first administration refused to sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, in keeping with other nuclear nations’ stance on the ban. It also unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty. But Mr. Trump did demonstrate an ambitious willingness to sit down with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, even though those talks ultimately went nowhere.

He has a chance now to atone for past mistakes. Masoud Pezeshkian, the new president of Iran, has signaled a willingness to restart serious nuclear negotiations with the West.

Mr. Trump’s campaign trumpeted his withdrawal from the previous deal, but in September, the candidate told reporters that he may be open to new talks. As reported in Politico, when asked about it, Mr. Trump said: “We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal.”

Mr. Trump, to his credit, grasps the dangers here. Perhaps he can also use some of his influence with President Putin to come to terms on the issue. Here again, some of his campaign rhetoric offers a glimpse of hope. Referring to Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said in 2023, “He goes, ‘You know, we’re a great nuclear power.’ He says that publicly now.” Mr. Trump added, falsely: “He never said that when I was here. Because you don’t talk about it. It’s too destructive. You don’t talk about it. Now they’re talking about it all the time.”

To entice China to the table, Mr. Trump could express an openness to declare that the United States would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. The president-elect has shown a willingness to engage, inviting China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to his January inauguration.

China has spent the past year signaling the importance of this issue as a necessary requirement for it to move forward in meaningful nuclear talks.

A willingness to engage on a blanket no-first-use policy may ease tensions and provide a foothold for more ambitious discussions.

While the military still regularly tests the intercontinental ballistic missiles that would deliver a nuclear strike, it hasn’t conducted an explosive underground test of the warheads themselves in more than three decades.

A moratorium on testing nuclear weapons has also held in China and Russia. There are growing fears this could soon change, as all three nations update and expand the infrastructure and sites needed to test nuclear weapons, according to commercial satellite imagery by Planet Labs PBC. The photos, analyzed by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, show each nation is adding buildings, cutting roads and boring tunnels — construction that many fear could presage live explosions.

A nuclear weapon doesn’t need to be used in war to have lasting impact. More than 2,000 such weapons were tested during the 20th century, spreading fallout that still affects human beings, public health and the environment. That, in part, is why the United States, along with every other country with nuclear weapons, except North Korea, has voluntarily observed a testing moratorium since the 1990s. The next Trump administration should work to make sure it remains in effect.

The conservative manifesto Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation, specifically calls for preparing the nuclear testing site in Nevada for a new generation of tests, which — unlike the tests at Vandenberg — involve detonating actual nuclear explosives. Last summer, in the journal Foreign Affairs, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien wrote that “the United States has to maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles. To do so, Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992 — not just by using computer models.” Given this logic, Russia and China would be justified in thinking the same.

Mr. Trump’s campaign distanced itself from both Project 2025 and Mr. O’Brien’s comments, and Mr. O’Brien has not yet been tapped to join the next administration.

If Mr. Trump decides the United States should resume nuclear explosive testing, China and Russia will almost surely follow suit. Mr. Putin has already threatened as much. Emerging nuclear powers, such as Iran, would also presumably feel no restraint on carrying out their own tests.

On top of all this, it makes no strategic sense. Starting to test again now would erode the huge scientific advantage the United States enjoys today. The U.S. government has conducted more than 1,000 known nuclear detonations — more than China and the Soviet Union combined. Data from those tests, combined with our unparalleled computing power, has allowed America to maintain and improve its arsenal in a way that its rivals can’t.

The United States, Russia and China are now feverishly overhauling their nuclear arsenals in sweeping multibillion-dollar efforts that the federal government benignly calls “modernizing.” The Pentagon plans to update the nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, including the missiles, bomber jets, submarines and warheads, at nearly $2 trillion.

Mr. Trump could roll back some of that effort. Why must the U.S. military replace all of its weapons in one go? Hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved simply by buying fewer of them. Even if Mr. Trump doesn’t want to cancel anything, he could at least give himself the political space to rethink such investments by appointing a commission to examine the full range and progress of the modernization plans, which are already over-budget and behind schedule.

Project 2025, however, rejects congressional efforts to find more cost-effective alternatives to the current plans, calling instead for a nuclear escalation that could rival President Ronald Reagan’s at the height of the Cold War.

While Mr. Trump may have distanced himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, Christopher Miller, a former U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who served as his acting defense secretary, was the lead author of its 42-page chapter on defense. Some other alarming proposals include that the second Trump White House prioritize nuclear weapons; develop nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles, which were withdrawn in the early 1990s; and continue a Biden-era effort to develop a sweeping, untested “cruise missile defense of the homeland” — all of which would require a significant budget increase to bankroll.

Mr. Trump has often condemned the hawkish attitudes of other conservatives. This is the time for him to show that he believes nuclear escalation is a bad idea. It’s taken some political courage for Mr. Trump to stake out an independent path from Republican orthodoxy on war-and-peace issues, and this is a chance to put his own views into action.

President Trump will command about 3,700 weapons that he alone is empowered to launch. Any decision responding to an incoming nuclear attack on the United States would have to be made within as little as 15 minutes.

It is concern over any precipitous action that led Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Ted Lieu of California, both Democrats, last year to propose legislation to prohibit any president from launching a first-strike nuclear weapon without congressional approval.

Although it is unlikely to be taken up by this Republican-led Congress, the bill would not undercut Mr. Trump’s ability to respond to a nuclear attack, an authority all presidents have had and should have.

Agreeing that a pre-emptive nuclear strike should also be endorsed by Congress would be a signal to the world that the United States is serious about limiting nuclear brinkmanship — that disputes among nations should not turn on impulsive nuclear threats of the type that Mr. Putin regularly issues. Mr. Trump wouldn’t be weakening himself. He’d be showing the world that he rejects hollow threats.

One paradox of the nuclear age is that it has often been the most bellicose leaders who become the most committed — and who are the most effective — at securing arms control deals and shrinking global stockpiles. Dwight Eisenhower, who led the allied war effort against the Nazis, came to warn against the military-industrial complex. Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy were swaggering brinksmen until they brought the world close to annihilation. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev each came to see that nuclear weapons were vastly more dangerous in an unstable world.

Donald Trump ran a campaign of peace through strength. Time will tell if he can deliver what he promised. But all Americans should rejoice if Mr. Trump leaves the world a safer place from nuclear weapons than it was when he took office for the second time.