A Dispatch From The Department Of Existential Threats

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists suggests we are still “three minutes to midnight” on their Doomsday Clock, where midnight is, unsurprisingly, all-out nuclear war.

The clock may tick one minute closer given recent tweets from the PEOTUS regarding the US nuclear arsenal.

Let’s not forget that as of right now, the US and Russia control about 93% of the global supply of nuclear weapons, according to the Ploughshares Fund’s 2016 “World Nuclear Stockpile Report”.

Although Russia’s stockpile exceeds that of the US by about 5%, in terms of the number of nuclear weapons in the arsenal, both the US and Russia are still locked in a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) situation. Given the cordial overtures the incoming administration has made toward Russia, it’s not likely that Trump seeks to “greatly strengthen and expand [the US] nuclear capability” to counterbalance the Russians.

What makes even less sense about all this is that the Obama administration has already authorized a program to modernize and maintain the US nuclear arsenal. This program may cost $1 trillion (yes, with a ‘T’) over the next 30 years, $348 billion of which will be spend in the next 10 years alone, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.

Who, then, is the bogeyman here? Besides Russia, there is no other country with a nuclear arsenal that even comes close to that of the US. No other country besides Russia has such a deep triad of strategic nuclear force projection capabilities, which consists of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic nuclear bombers. (It might also be good to recall that, this time last year, Trump didn’t appear to know what the nuclear triad is when asked about it at a CNN Republican primary debate.)

Any possible concern on Trump’s end over China or Pakistan, the only putative US adversaries with significant nuclear arsenals, are vastly, profoundly overblown. They’re small potatoes compared to Russia and the US. The arsenals other players in this end-game (France, the UK, India, Israel, and North Korea) either belong to US allies or rivals of little significance.

Trump’s tweet suggested that the US expand its nuclear capability “until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” I argue that an opposite approach is more prudent: maintain and even continue the reduction of our nuclear arsenal, in lock-step with Russia, as we’ve done fairly consistently since the end of the Cold War.

It may be okay to stay MAD. MAD is stable, that is, until someone gets angry.