Thinking about Trump as President is disturbing in itself. Thinking about Trump and nuclear war is orders of magnitude more disturbing.
Given Trump’s fairly obvious lack of any strategic vision worth the name and his often remarkably incompetent and chaotic diplomacy, it’s hard to imagine that he understands anything substantial about nuclear deterrence beyond they-have-bombs-and-so-do we.
But Allison, who does know a lot about the topic, offers an optimistic speculation (or hopeful wish?) that:
Trump learned from Reagan that “a nuclear war cannot be won and therefore must never be fought”—and he has thought about what that means. As Reagan repeatedly explained, if at the end of a war one had completely eliminated our adversary but our own country had been destroyed, no one could count that as a victory.Part of his hopeful assessment, he explains, is that Trump’s views on nuclear war:
... are rooted in lessons he learned when he was a young man from his uncle John Trump, who was a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at MIT. As Trump tells the story, long before he ever dreamed of becoming president, his uncle challenged him to think about the unthinkable. In Trump’s words: “I used to discuss nuclear with him all the time. He was a great expert. He was a great, brilliant genius.”How much credibility we can put on any of Trump’s own autobiographical claims is certainly open to question. And Trump is always bragging about how he is (as he once said) “a very stable genius.” But the only real quality he displays that could be considered genius is his talent at self-marketing. And, not to be picky, but expertise in electrical engineering is not in itself expertise in nuclear bombs, much less strategic deterrence theory.
A BBC article in 2018 points out that Uncle John “co-founded a company making generators for use in nuclear research, according to MIT archives.” (2) The occasion of that article was a recent visit back then by Trump to his admired North Korean colleague Kim Jong-un to talk about denuclearizing North Korea. Peace President Trump did not persuade his friend Kim to give up his nuclear-weapons program. According to the Arms Control Association, “North Korea is estimated to have assembled 50 nuclear warheads, as of January 2024, and to have the fissile material for an estimated 70-90 nuclear weapons, as well as advanced chemical and biological weapons programs.” (3)
Allison makes this important historical point about Trump’s recent announcement that he was sending two nuclear submarines closer to Russia in response to a threatening reference to nukes from former Russian President and still a senior Putin national security official Dmitry Medvedev:
Historians will note that this is the first case in which an American president has announced publicly to an adversary a change in the US nuclear forces or plans since JFK’s televised address to the American people on October 22, 1962. That was the most dangerous crisis in recorded history.The idea that Donald Trump is the final US decisionmaker on nuclear war during a situation that could be comparable to “the most dangerous crisis in recorded history” is a hair-raising thought!
But Allison’s comparison of Dmitry Medvedev verbally yanking Trump’s chain to the threat of nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba in 1962 seems like a big stretch. And what he cites from John Kennedy was his dramatic statement that “any nuclear missile launched from Cuba will be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
But what he quotes Trump saying in the current case was, “I have ordered two Nuclear Subs to be positioned in the appropriate regions just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.”
And Allison writes, “Predictably, [Trump’s critics] have criticized what they’ve called his ‘grandstanding,’ pointing out that US SSBNs (nuclear-armed submarines) are always in ‘appropriate regions’ since wherever they are, their missiles can hit targets in Russia.” And a nuclear powered submarine isn’t necessarily equipped with nuclear weapons, a fact probably not noted enough in news accounts. But Allison compares that to what hawkish foreign policy advocates like to remember as JFK’s “eyeball to eyeball” moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This BBC News clip does make more than one mention of the ambiguity of what Trump’s statement about “nuclear submarines” e3xactly means: (4)
Allison even declares his opinion that “that Trump has a better understanding of nuclear perils than any other political leader on the national or international stage today.” If I believed that, I would commit to spending the rest of my life in a monastery enforcing a vow of silence and forbidding contact with the outside world.
Maybe at the suggestion of an editor, Allison adds immediately following that judgement, “For comparison, the only other recent American leader with a similar deep understanding of this challenge was Joe Biden.” Whatever one’s concerns about Biden’s mental acuity during his Presidency may be, does anyone besides the Orange Anomaly himself seriously believe he has as good an understanding of nuclear deterrence strategy as Joe Biden?
Notes:
(1) Allison, Graham (2025): Is Donald Trump Right About Nukes? The National Interest 08/08/2025. <https://nationalinterest.org/feature/is-donald-trump-right-about-nukes> (Accessed: 21025-10-08).
(2) Who is Donald Trump's 'brilliant genius' nuclear Uncle John? BBC News 06/13/2018. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44457471> (Accessed: 21025-10-08).
(3) Arms Control and Proliferation Profile: North Korea. Arms Control Association, June 2024. <https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/arms-control-and-proliferation-profile-north-korea#Nuclear> (Accessed: 21025-10-08).
(4) Trump deploys nuclear submarines after “provocative comments” by former Russian President. BBC News YouTube channel 08/01/2025. <https://youtu.be/jWDL0iP_wnA?si=BdGnxuMCCVtE3ORw> (Accessed: 21025-10-08).
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