If one follows his statements alone, President Trump’s position on nuclear weapons is confusing, to put it mildly. In February of this year he told a group of reporters the following:
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 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.” He expressed similar sentiments the month before, saying “let’s see if we can denuclearize.”
“Denuclearizing” a world with eight nuclear weapons states is no small task. Even getting the U.S., Russia and China to the table to discuss possibilities for reducing the danger of nuclear conflict is a daunting challenge in the current global political climate. But even small first steps – things like more frequent dialogue, crisis communications procedures, and greater transparency about nuclear arsenals and nuclear plans – would be a welcome alternative to a runaway nuclear arms race that could end with devastating consequences, by accident or design.
Unfortunately, President Trump has yet to take action to back up his stated concerns about nuclear weapons. In fact, his administration is poised to pour billions of additional dollars into the Pentagon’s plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines – a plan that by one estimate could cost up to $2 trillion over the next three decades
In separating rhetoric from reality, it is often useful to follow the money. By this measure, the Trump administration is moving rapidly in the opposite direction from the President’s stated concerns about nuclear buildups. Spending on nuclear weapons was exempted from the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) search for potential reductions in Pentagon programs, and spending on the Department of Energy’s nuclear warhead complex has been put forward for an enormous 53% increase in the proposed fiscal year 2026 budget announced late last month. And last year the Pentagon decided to go full speed ahead on the troubled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) project, the Sentinel, which is under development by Northrop Grumman. The decision to keep funding the Sentinel came despite an 81% estimated cost increase since the start of the development of the system just a few short years ago.
It would be one thing if all this new spending was making us safer, but it is not. As former secretary of defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are among “the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon warning of attack, thereby increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm. As the Union of Concerned Scientists and other independent experts have noted, U.S. submarines and bombers have more than enough firepower to deter any nation from attacking the United States. The continuing existence of ICBMs is a holdover from the Cold War and a testament to the power of the ICBM lobby, a group of senators from states with ICBM bases or major ICBM productions sites who have teamed up with nuclear weapons producing companies to block virtually every effort to reduce spending or deployment of ICBMs. In essence, ICBMs are sustained more by parochial economic interests than they are by any useful role they might play in defending the country.
The only way to get President Trump to reverse course and act on his anti-nuclear rhetoric is through concerned citizen pressure. In the 1980s, the nuclear freeze campaign and the million person march for disarmament in Central Park helped turn President Reagan around, from a proponent of a costly nuclear arms race with the “evil empire” centered in Moscow to the man who said “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,” even as he set the stage for substantial reductions in the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
At the moment, other issues have outpaced nuclear weapons as areas of public concern: immigration policy, gay and trans rights, the potential deep cuts in domestic spending contained in the so-called “big, beautiful bill” supported by the president, and more. Anti-nuclear advocates need to build ties with these movements, not to get them to make nuclear disarmament their top issue, but to build a network of mutual trust in which those groups would weigh in at key points, like when the administration proposes huge increases in nuclear spending that come at the expense of other urgently needed programs.
It will also be important to champion steps short of actual nuclear reductions that can reduce the risk of nuclear war, like those cited above, centered around dialogue, information exchange, and a recognition that a nuclear conflict would be an unprecedented catastrophe that would serve no one’s interest and could well end life as we know it. Somehow, in the midst of the daily crises and sense of chaos that have become all too familiar, we need to elevate the danger of nuclear conflict in the public consciousness and encourage people to press for and end to nuclear arms racing and a beginning of discussions to reduce nuclear arsenals and reduce the risk that these potentially world-ending weapons will ever be used. Reducing our enormous investment of tax dollars in new nuclear weapons would be an excellent place to start.
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