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Probably Oblivion

The nukes under the second Trump administration Wikimedia?Commons/The Baffler

The earliest days of the new administration—with its false starts, take backs, and preposterous double-talk—had some obscene curiosities for anyone who thinks about nuclear weapons in a sustained way. On February 13, President Trump told reporters:

There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many. You could destroy the world fifty times over, one hundred times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons. We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive. One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, “Let’s cut our military budget in half.” And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.

Here as everywhere, it’s almost impossible to parse pure bluster and policymaking, but this has been a consistent theme: the president named nuclear weapons as the overlooked primary threat to the world, if only as a way to play down climate change. Given the first Trump administration’s record on nuclear issues—the man has not been shy about issuing threats of using nuclear weapons as he has to North Korea and Russia, and he withdrew the United States from several key treaties (the Iran Deal, but also the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty)—this all sounded much, much too good to be true, especially as the administration was already busy destroying the federal government’s ability to do anything at all.

When news broke that the administration planned to establish a department devoted to aggressive cuts to government spending and capabilities, there was a rash of proposals for cutting the U.S. military budget, which had grown to within spitting distance of one trillion dollars during Biden’s term. There were credulous recommendations to increase efficiency and “drive American military superiority” and more meaningful calls to end long-term, deeply dysfunctional programs. The F-35 fighter jet program, for example, is proving difficult to maintain and not all that useful. Then there’s the Sentinel ICBM program, over 80 percent over budget, years behind schedule, and partially paused but nonetheless certified as a necessity despite a strong consensus that intercontinental ballistic missiles stored in underground silos increase the chance of an accidental nuclear first strike.

Several months in, the administration’s approach to spending has amounted to a kind of zombie Reaganism, fully unburdened by any tired midcentury notion that government spending on the welfare of its people, and people around the world whose sympathies it hopes to secure, might be worthwhile. Military spending will stay the course: a terse news release from the Department of Defense announced that it would be “putting forward budgets that revive the warrior ethos.”

There is less novelty than continuity here. Even Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” proposal plays on a dream deep within American conservatism since the 1980s: a “missile defense” system that would stop any incoming missile strike on the continental United States by shooting them out of the sky. You can pick your favorite reason why this is an unserious proposal: it would require far, far more money than the $30 billion or so the United States spent last year on missile defense systems, which in any case have not demonstrated the power to reliably stop incoming missiles. A system that could cover the entire United States would be massive, its only precedent being smaller systems, like Israel’s Iron Dome, dealing with relatively small, non-nuclear missile attacks. And developing ways to make other countries’ nuclear weapons useless tends to encourage them to develop more advanced weapons and tactics that can get around those defenses.

Any preexisting commitment on the part of Trump or his staff to making nuclear weapons less important to United States foreign policy is already being tested. New START, the last treaty limiting the number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia can have in their arsenals, expires in February 2026. Trump’s willingness to pursue a treaty could optimistically be interpreted as an understanding of what’s at stake if the treaty is allowed to expire. But it is more likely to meet the same fate as the diplomatic initiatives of the first Trump term. The “maximum pressure” approach to negotiations—accepting no less than total acceptance of their demands—has come to shape the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Rather than diplomatic solutions to thorny international conflicts, to seriously entertain the possibility of sustained negotiations involving concessions to the other side is increasingly to admit a fatal weakness. To wit, Trump’s inclusion of China in an arms control framework is fundamentally unworkable because China has consistently expressed that it will not participate in negotiations involving arsenal reductions with the United States and Russia while such large disparities in the number of their nuclear weapons persist. Ever more aggressive military posturing is an ineffective, dangerous way to fill these diplomatic gaps.

Perhaps this is a strategic, calculated unreasonableness, but so far the results have not been promising. In expressing his support for arms control, Trump portrayed Gaza and Ukraine as issues that need to be “straightened out” first; he is apparently frustrated that the war in Ukraine hasn’t ended despite his efforts, and the recent public failure of his meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t seem to be a performance in service of a larger forthcoming deal. Though Russia has indicated it is open to arms control and even possible arsenal reduction measures, Trump’s insouciance makes the task no less difficult. It seems unlikely that DOGE’s animating purpose of American self-defeat will allow for a better nuclear status quo–it is, after all, headed by someone who has benefited fabulously from America’s largesse when it comes to military spending. Among the hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who were unceremoniously fired, before being less ceremoniously hired back, were the people who oversee the production of plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (Plutonium pits help put the nuclear in nuclear weapon; their job is to trigger the main explosion). Without a full staff, the United States cannot maintain the nuclear weapons arsenal it has, let alone fulfill the full extent of its nuclear ambitions. Though they have been restored to their jobs, reporting suggests that a longer process of employee attrition has begun, as highly trained contractors and employees see which way the wind is blowing and seek something more stable.

The United States has committed billions of dollars and reshaped its nuclear weapons industry around “modernization,” which in practice means wholly replacing its existing nuclear weapons, and the infrastructure that maintains them. But in the case of plutonium pits, the actual pace of manufacturing means that even with spending at unheard-of highs, a program of this size and complexity may be fundamentally out of reach of American military manufacturing capacity. The goal is for the lab to produce thirty plutonium pits a year by 2028, out of eighty total. In October 2024, the Department of Energy announced that Los Alamos had managed to produce a single plutonium pit. (Plutonium pit production in the United States has a grisly history: Rocky Flats, the facility where an earlier generation of plutonium pits were produced, was closed down by an FBI/EPA raid following a history of accidents, leaks, and serious mismanagement.) The other planned?plutonium pit production facility, meant to produce the remaining fifty pits per year, at the Savannah River Site in Georgia, has been put on pause after activists won a more thorough review of the environmental impact on an area that has been dealing with extensive contamination from U.S. nuclear weapons program for decades. Production at expected levels would place additional stress on the Los Alamos facility—whose key employees may now have one foot out the door. The pits are meant to be used in a new nuclear warhead known as the W87-1. The warheads will, in turn, be mounted on the Sentinel missile, whose success as a program is in doubt given its budget issues and delays.

Even at intended rates of production, military manufacturing is notoriously unwieldy, over budget, and subject to delays. Despite the protests of Department of Defense officials, they don’t experience anything remotely like the budget constraints imposed upon other sectors of U.S. government activity. But more money may not be enough. Even outside the realm of nuclear weapons manufacturing, it’s not clear that the United States can match its evermore vociferous insistence on maintaining its preferred position as global hegemon through military power alone. A Biden administration-led effort to bring a greater share of non-nuclear manufacturing in chip manufacturing and other key industries to the United States in anticipation of war with China is years behind schedule, with no target date for the United States being able to independently produce the chips it needs. A Texas factory to produce 155mm shells for use by the Ukrainian Army, hailed as a comeback for U.S. manufacturing, was in fact provided with their machinery by a Turkish company, whose workers also installed the equipment. “Almost eight decades after US military assistance to Turkey inaugurated a new world order,” writes Tim Barker. Military assistance is “flowing back the other way, from the nation with NATO’s second largest military to the nation with NATO’s largest military.”

So what’s next if the United States is less able to manage technologically advanced capabilities across the board, there are no arms control treaties in place, and the United States cannot pursue unrestrained expansion of its own arsenal, let alone maintain the one it currently has? One of the big justifications for U.S. nuclear weapons has always been what’s called “extended deterrence,” or the agreement, enshrined in legal and logistical arrangements, that the United States will use its nuclear weapons to defend certain allied countries from nuclear attack. Should another country launch a nuclear weapon (or some other very serious attack, since the United States has never ruled out its using nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks) at an ally covered by an extended deterrence agreement, it can expect a retaliatory strike from the United States. This arrangement covers NATO members, as well as South Korea, Australia, Japan, and areas of the South Pacific.

Crucially, this arrangement structures the U.S. role in NATO. The Trump administration’s record of skepticism about the U.S. role in the organization has led European countries to develop their own military industrial capacities—hardly a win for anyone other than that industry (sensing a theme here?). Its rapid withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine has massively accelerated this trend. Europe has indicated its willingness to fill the gap: on March 4, the European Union announced a plan to raise 800 billion euros to expand member countries’ military production capabilities. France, which has about three hundred nuclear weapons of its own but has relied on U.S. extended deterrence, has proposed a “nuclear sharing” agreement internal to Europe, where along with the United Kingdom it would provide a similar guarantee to non-nuclear European countries.

Scattered but persistent proposals for more European countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals have not yet amounted to the emergence of a tenth nuclear-weapons state. For now, as European leaders remain in support of some kind of deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program, this seems unlikely. But with the United States increasingly behaving as if nuclear proliferation is less a red line and more an unfortunate eventuality, it’s not out of the question. In theory, this is exactly what Trump wants: Europe will pay its “fair share” in an organization that has allowed the United States to call the shots far beyond its territorial borders for decades and provided ongoing justification for the profitable, ambiguously productive business of maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons.

Of course, this is by no means the only scenario for a nuclear future in the minds of policy makers or possibly even the American electorate. Rumors of a “multipolar world,” where China’s nuclear arsenal seriously rivals those of the United States and Russia, have driven arguments that America must be read to fight a nuclear war on two fronts, a popular turn of mind that makes the audacious assumption that a nuclear strike would leave anything to fight with. Official claims about China’s nuclear forces are predicated on the assurances of America’s military leaders that China will have one thousand nuclear weapons in its arsenal by 2030, while reliable estimates maintain that for the moment China has around five hundred, less than one-tenth of either the United States or Russia. The economic purpose of stoking fears of a war with China goes beyond the nuclear issue: an industry-wide mobilization for a U.S.-China war centered around Taiwan has focused on 2027 as the prospective start date.

Understanding the nuclear politics of the early Trump administration, then, has less to do with the actual weapons—whether they’ll be used, whether the president’s statements in favor of arms control and disarmament have any connection to reality—and more to do with their usefulness as an anchor for government contracts for the companies that build and maintain them. The most immediately worrisome scenario remains an accidental first strike, driven by how little time is allowed for decision-making. The nuclear infrastructure of the United States is profoundly fragile, even when fully staffed. Each day brings a new opportunity for destruction at the scale and efficiency that nuclear weapons have always promised. In the words of the American president, “That’s going to be probably oblivion.”