[President Trump has undermined a US arms control regime developed
over seven decades by successive US administrations. He is seeking to
reverse important steps towards disarmament and arms control taken by
every US president from Eisenhower to Obama.] [[link removed]]

TRUMP’S WAR ON SEVEN DECADES OF ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT  
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Melvin Goodman
August 12, 2020
CounterPunch
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_ President Trump has undermined a US arms control regime developed
over seven decades by successive US administrations. He is seeking to
reverse important steps towards disarmament and arms control taken by
every US president from Eisenhower to Obama. _

Workers cut submarine nuclear missile launch tubes as part of the
1991 Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which provides funding and
expertise for states in the former Soviet Union to decommission
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapon stockpiles. , US Department
of Defense, Public Domain

 

Seventy-five years ago, the United States dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 Japanese and
injuring another 100,000.  The great fires that raged in each city
consumed many of the bodies.  If ever there was a visceral force for
promoting a world free of nuclear arms, it should be the memory of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In view of Donald Trump’s ignorance and indifference, it is no
surprise that the White House made no mention on August 6th and August
9th of these horrific events.  Trump has been too busy scrapping many
of the arms control and disarmament treaties that it inherited from
previous administrations.  Trump made it clear in the 2016
presidential debates that he had no understanding of the central
issues of the nuclear arms race, including the nuclear triad.  When
he couldn’t answer a question on nuclear verification, Trump
typically bluffed that “it would take me an hour and a half to learn
everything there is to know about missiles.  I think I know most of
it anyway.”

In July 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the members of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff were alarmed by Trump’s nuclear ignorance, so
they held a seminar in the Pentagon’s Tank to brief the president on
the nuclear inventory.  Tillerson’s infamous reference to Trump as
a “fucking moron” was in response to the president’s demands for
increasing the size of the nuclear inventory tenfold.  Several days
later, national security adviser H.R. McMaster referred to the
president as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the mind of a
“kindergartener.” (This challenged a military code that forbids an
officer from criticizing the president of the United States.)

Trump’s hostile and counterproductive acts have undermined the arms
control regime that U.S. presidents have developed over the past seven
decades.  Every president from Eisenhower to Obama contributed to
improving the verification and monitoring of strategic arms; reducing
the numbers of strategic weapons; eliminating intermediate-range
missiles, and/or trying to avoid accidental confrontation.  During
the presidential campaign in 2016, ten former nuclear control officers
anticipated the worst and organized a letter stating that, if elected,
Trump should not be given the nuclear codes.

For the past two years, Trump has taken steps to thoroughly weaken the
arms control regime.  In 2018, Trump scuttled the Iran nuclear
accord, which had brought a measure of predictability to the volatile
Middle East.  The Trump administration then scuttled the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which was responsible
for the destruction of more missiles than any treaty in history. More
recently, the Trump administration walked away from the Open Skies
Treaty, which was negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and
Secretary of State James Baker in 1992, but has a history that dates
to the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.  The treaty was
particularly important to the Baltic and East European states for
monitoring Russian troop movements on their borders.  Trump’s claim
that the treaty allowed surveys of U.S. civilian sites, “an
unacceptable risk to our national security,” was particularly
ludicrous.  Information on U.S. infrastructure is publicly available
to anyone from Google Earth as well as commercial imagery.

The Trump administration may break the moratorium on nuclear testing,
which has been in place for nearly three decades.  The United States
has conducted more nuclear tests (1,032) than all other nuclear powers
combined (1026).  China, for example, has conducted only 45 tests. 
Underground testing, moreover, is unnecessary; computer simulations
are perfectly adequate.  In addition to the possibility of more
nuclear testing, Trump has walked away from the Outer Space Treaty and
created a Space Force, which could take an arms race to space.

Trump’s national security adviser at the time most of these steps
were taken was John Bolton, who was in President George W. Bush’s
administration in 2002, when Bush recklessly abrogated the
Anti-Ballistics Missile Treaty (ABM), the cornerstone to strategic
deterrence.  Republican administrations were responsible for both INF
and ABM, with Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan ignoring
opposition from the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs
of Staff to conclude the treaties.  Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger and undersecretary of defense Richard Perle, the Prince of
Darkness, resigned because of their opposition to INF.  DoD civilians
and the uniformed military have a long history of opposition to arms
control and disarmament.

Finally, there is no indication that the United States is prepared to
renew or extend the New START accord negotiated by the Obama
administration in 2010, which made significant reductions in nuclear
launchers and warheads.  U.S. officials argue there is no point in
returning to the negotiating table with Russia without the presence of
China. This amounts to a “poison pill” because China has many
fewer nuclear warheads and launchers than Russia and the United
States, and has demonstrated no interest in joining disarmament talks
because of the strategic imbalance.  Meanwhile, Trump is committed to
an investment of $1.2 trillion to conduct an unneeded modernization of
nuclear forces.

These steps are having serious consequences.  The combination of
ending the INF Treaty and failing to renew the New START accord will
lead to increased defense spending in Russia and China. In the Middle
East, the abrogation of the Iran nuclear accord led Saudi Arabia and
China to begin working together to build an industrial capacity to
produce nuclear fuel.  A current intelligence study points to the
possibility of secret Saudi-Chinese efforts to process raw uranium
into a form that can be enriched into weapons fuel.  Last year, the
International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Saudi Arabia and
Jordan were cooperating to make yellowcake, a concentrated form of
uranium ore that is central to enriching uranium into nuclear fuel.

The Trump administration is also ignoring the Missile Technology
Control Regime, signed by 35 nations, to limit the sale of
sophisticated weaponry, particularly advanced armed drones.  Trump
and the Department of State announced they would ignore restrictions
in order to sell the MQ-9 Reaper to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates.  Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, is an
enthusiastic supporter of these sales.  Saudi Arabia and the UAE have
been guilty of war crimes in Yemen with their use of advanced U.S.
weaponry.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has placed the arms control
account in the hands of Marshall Billingslea, who has no experience in
the field but has been nominated to be the UnderSecretary of State for
Arms Control.  He began his career as an aide to Senator Jesse Helms,
the leading opponent of arms control throughout the 1990s, and his
most recent government position has been that of Assistant Secretary
of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing.  One of his most recent
statements on arms races is most telling: “We know how to win these
races, and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion.”

Billingslea supports the senseless U.S. modernization of its nuclear
inventory and bloated defense spending in general, which is why the
United States lacks funding for investment in public health and
infrastructure. Billingslea encountered significant congressional
opposition to confirmation in his previous positions because of his
well-documented history of advocating the use of torture and other
unlawful interrogation practices.

Of course, if the United States is serious about arms control and
disarmament, the Trump administration could respond to Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s interest in engaging the United States in
discussions on a no-first-use of nuclear weapons; no militarization of
outer space; and the creation of nuclear-free zones.  At the same
time, we should stop the gratuitous reconnaissance flights over the
Black Sea; rotating troops in Poland; and the construction of a
regional missile defense in Poland and Romania in order to create an
opening for serious discussions.

_[Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for
International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins
University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure
of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA
[[link removed]] and National
Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism
[[link removed]].
and A Whistleblower at the CIA
[[link removed]].
His most recent book is “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald
Trump” (Opus Publishing), and he is the author of the forthcoming
“The Dangerous National Security State” (2020).” Goodman is the
national security columnist for counterpunch.org
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