A big reason why no one has dropped or fired a nuclear weapon in wartime in the 80 years since Nagasaki—a remarkable fact that almost no one would have thought possible at the time—is the fear of its consequences, aka Mutually Assured Destruction: If you blow us to smithereens, we’ll blow you to smithereens.
Yet in another sense, in the decades since, military officers and civilian strategists have tried to work around Truman’s warning—have tried to figure out how to turn the bomb into “a military weapon.” In the early days of the Nuclear Age, the top generals, like Curtis LeMay, the first head of the Strategic Air Command [the real-life version of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper], did so with a ruthless attitude: War was about killing people and destroying countries, so the bigger the bomb, the better. However, later on, some strategists thought about how to fight a nuclear war because they calculated doing so was the best way to deter such a war from happening. (1)
Through the 1990s, there was still a largely bipartisan understanding and assumption that nuclear arms control was a good and necessary element of national security policy.
But now, writes Ross Anderson, “The decades-long effort to keep nuclear weapons from spreading across the planet may be about to collapse.” (2)
Trump was very impressed with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during his first term. But Trump’s supposed efforts to get an nuclear nonproliferation agreement with his friend Kim – they wrote each other “love letters,” Trump said – just failed. And North Korea now has nuclear weapons. As Anderson notes, this is not something which South Korea has failed to notice:
Kim Jong Un has ruled as dictator in Pyongyang for 13 years, during which he has often threatened the South with reunification by force, and, more recently, outright annexation, just as Vladimir Putin has attempted in Ukraine. Kim is quickly expanding his nuclear arsenal. He already has dozens of warheads, and has threatened to use them not only as defensive weapons of last resort, but in a first strike that would turn Seoul into a “sea of flames.”
For decades, the threat of intense U.S. retaliation helped keep Kim’s father and grandfather from invading the South. But Kim rules at a time when Pax American looks to be winding down. Under Trump, the United States is now reported to be considering pulling troops out of South Korea, though administration officials have denied that. “The Korean people do not know if the U.S. commitment to them is real,” Heo told me. They may soon decide that to deter Kim, they need nuclear weapons of their own. [my emphasis]
The nuclear threat is not going to be maintained by Iraq War-style “wars of liberation” or by US-promoted revolutions against government controlling nuclear weapons.
And Trump in his first term just blowing off the effective arms-control agreement with Iran (JCPOA) virtually guarantees that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.
This is an issue where rational calculation and a realistic evaluation of their national interests on the part of countries like South Korea can lead to more proliferation. But the more countries that acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that others will acquire them, as well. And the overall risk of nuclear war rises, even though it may be entirely practical and reasonable for South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterring North Korea, it exposes both countries to the risk of catastrophic levels of destruction that wouldn’t otherwise be the case.
But for nuclear arms control worldwide to be successful, the existing nuclear powers – particularly the US, Russia, Britain, and France will also have to consistently and permanently respect the national sovereignty of countries that agree to forego building their own nukes. At this point, the opposite has been the case for Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and now Iran.
Trump’s blowhard talk about abandoning NATO allies – and literally threatening two of them, Denmark and Canada, with military attack and annexation – also make US allies like South Korea ask questions about how reliable US support for them is in the case of a war with nuclear-armed North Korea.
One of the worst consequences of the “unipolar moment” of the United States in the post-USSR world that that it has created huge incentives for countries to accelerate the nuclear arms race. It didn’t have to be this way. After 1989, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and South Africa all agreed to dispose of their nuclear weapons. Now the proliferation train is up and running again.
Anderson also notes that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a cornerstone agreement against the spread of nuclear weapons, could fall apart:
Indeed, the entire Non-Proliferation Treaty regime could unravel altogether. When Israel, India, and Pakistan went nuclear, they were not part of the Non- Proliferation Treaty (nor are they today), but South Korea is a member in good standing and Japan is, in some sense, the treaty’s soul. If those two countries flout the agreement, it will have effectively dissolved. Jake Sullivan, the former U.S. national security adviser, told me that the risk of a global proliferation cascade wouldrise “considerably.” The initial regional cascades are easy to imagine. The American pullback in Ukraine has already made Poland and Germany a lot more interested in going nuclear. If the Iranian nuclear program survives Israel’s attacks and develops a weapon successfully, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will likely want arsenals as well. The number of countries that have nuclear arms could quickly double. [my emphasis]
And, as Eric Ross recently reminded us:
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to two billion lives worldwide. (3)
Notes:
(1) Kaplan, Fred (2025): Eighty Years After the First Nuke Test, the World Is at a Dangerous Crossroads. Slate 07/17/2025. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/nuclear-bomb-trinity-test-donald-trump.html> (Accessed: 17-07-2025).
(2) Anderson, Ross (2025): The New Arms Race. The Atlantic Aug 2025.
(3) Ross, Eric (2025): 80 Years After Trinity. TomDispatch 07/17/2025. <https://tomdispatch.com/80-years-after-trinity/> (Accessed: 197-07-2025).
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