The nine months of the second term of Donald Trump have shown the world the most aggressive side of the US president in foreign policy. Willing to bomb Iran or Yemen, to send aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines to the Venezuelan coast, or to threaten to annex friendly territories, from the Panama Canal to Greenland. According to his critics, the president's international vision resembles that of a bully: tough, violent, and assertive with the weaker ones and cautious, hesitant, and even cowardly with the stronger ones. But this analysis needs an additional element: Trump's obsession and panic with nuclear weapons.
The president has a fixation on this issue that explains his position in the Ukraine war or his willingness to act against Tehran before it gets the bomb. And also all his interventions this week on his Asian tour. On Wednesday, after evaluating the latest news about the Russian tests with Burevestnik cruise missiles, with nuclear capability, and a new nuclear-powered underwater drone, possibly capable of causing tsunamis, Trump reacted on his social media: "Due to the testing programs of other countries, I have instructed the Department of Defense to begin testing our nuclear weapons on equal terms," he stated.
The last US nuclear test, codenamed Divider, took place on September 23, 1992, in Nevada. That same year, then-President George H.W. Bush announced a moratorium on underground nuclear tests. The last explosive test was conducted by North Korea in 2017. Neither Russia nor China have taken that step for 35 and 29 years respectively.
And yet, Trump, on Friday, responded with an enigmatic "you will see" to the question of whether he was talking about underground explosions, something that the authors of the so-called Project 2025, the conservative roadmap followed by this Administration as a script, already suggested last year. Despite the strong advice against it from top experts. The US does not need it, as it has the most advanced technology to conduct non-explosive tests. And if it opens the door, the rest of the world will follow suit, reducing the first country's competitive advantage.
Wednesday was not the first comment by the American president in that line, although it was the harshest. Two days earlier, upon learning of the Russian tests, Trump urged Moscow to proceed with caution. "They know we have a nuclear submarine - the best in the world - right off their coast," he told reporters aboard Air Force One, stating that "the stealthy US ship" could reach any target. "It doesn't have to travel 8,000 miles," he added. "Russia is not playing with us. We are not playing with them either."
Already at the end of September, speaking before hundreds of generals and admirals, the president said, "we feel a little threatened by Russia, so I sent a nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever created," insisting that while Moscow and Beijing are "still behind in nuclear matters," their current rapid progress could make them equal to the US in five years.
The Republican leader is known for improvising, fantasizing, and having a very simplified view of global affairs. But he is also famous because his historical obsessions influence his current decisions. This is the case with tariffs, a recurring topic in his speeches for the past 50 years. And it is the case with nuclear weapons.
In the mid-80s, when he was a thirty-something millionaire in the real estate world, Trump offered himself several times to the government as a possible mediator with Russia for arms reduction agreements and in nuclear matters. True to his style, he said that it would be enough for him to "learn everything there is to know about missiles, which would take me an hour and a half... because I think I already know almost everything. I'm talking about catching up," and that he could quickly reach an agreement with Moscow, boasting, as he still does now, about his negotiating skills. "It's something you either have or you don't, and I have it."
Bernard Lown, the cardiologist who invented the defibrillator and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for his efforts to promote nuclear disarmament, spoke before his death in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about this issue. "Trump was already obsessed with Russia in 1986," he explained, giving details of how he met with him, as he wanted information about Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Lown had come to know. During that meeting, according to the doctor, the millionaire assured that he was pressuring Vice President George H. W. Bush to convince President Ronald Reagan to give him an official position in the USSR to negotiate a nuclear disarmament agreement on behalf of the United States, a job for which Trump felt uniquely qualified. "He told me: 'I heard that you met with Gorbachev, that you had a long interview with him, and that you are a doctor, so you have a good opinion of who he is. I plan to call my good friend Ronnie to appoint me as the plenipotentiary ambassador of the United States to Gorbachev.' Those were his exact words. And he said he would go to Moscow, sit down with Gorbachev, and then, with a hand gesture, he hit the desk and exclaimed: 'And in an hour, the Cold War will be over!'".
The president talks so much that it is easy to trace the origin of his likes and dislikes. Marked, like many Americans, by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, Trump often quotes his uncle John G. Trump, an electrical engineer from MIT who worked with nuclear physicists, and who was his reference on nuclear matters. Not by chance, the first half of the 80s had particularly dangerous moments between Moscow and Washington, such as the Able Archer exercises in 1983, which the Kremlin thought were the beginning of World War III. That year, by the way, the movie The Day After was released, which had a significant influence on the nuclear collective imagination and on the president, who often speaks of a nuclear explosion in cinematic terms, as if he were watching the images. Also not by chance, these days Netflix has released its latest global hit, A House of Dynamite, a movie in which the American president must decide whether to launch nuclear weapons, against no one in particular, in retaliation for an imminent nuclear attack. Something widely discussed in Washington and that has prompted Pentagon experts to comment critically on its realism.
Trump is a braggart, a threat, he talks, but both in Moscow and in Washington, they believe that his well-known fear of nuclear weapons and "nuclear winter", something he recurrently mentions in his closed-door meetings with leaders, diminishes a good part of the deterrence capacity of his country, especially in relations with Russia. In 2022, on television, Trump said that Biden should use the nuclear card to intimidate Putin on the Ukrainian issue. But since taking office, he has not done so at all. On the contrary, he has made it clear that the world cannot go into a nuclear confrontation over a piece of European land.
In his first term as president, the Republican repeatedly stated that "nuclear weapons are the world's primary problem". In February of this year, he insisted that they are "the greatest existential threat" and that the U.S. did not need more, as there were already too many. "There is no need to build more." Furthermore, he criticized the enormous cost of maintaining them. "We are all spending a lot of money that we could invest in more productive things," he lamented.
In his first term, Trump withdrew the country from several agreements, such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987, just as he was running for that responsibility, by Reagan and Gorbachev. His negotiators at the time, like Fiona Hill and John Bolton, say it was out of pure narcissism, as he forced the breakup before allowing others, his ambassadors, to take any credit. He wanted it all for himself.
Now, he advocates for a Golden Dome to protect his country from foreign missiles and once again sends a signal to his enemies that if they do not have nuclear weapons, they could be attacked at any time. In 2017, behind closed doors, Trump actually discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, repeatedly suggesting that it could be done and blaming others, as admitted by his then chief of staff. He was furious with Kim Jong-un, whom he threatened from the UN podium to "completely destroy" his country.
John Kelly, former Marine general, managed to convince him that it was not a good idea, and that the truth would come out, the president "again raised the possibility of war, even mentioning the possibility of launching a preemptive strike."
In his Defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, the Trump Administration wants to significantly increase spending on nuclear forces to $62 billion. Among the most benefited programs is the B-21 stealth bomber, with an additional $10.3 billion. Another $4.1 billion would go to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Sentinel program, which is significantly delayed. And $11.2 billion more for R&D and acquisitions for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines.