Donald Trump is plotting to turn Britain into a ‘nuclear launchpad’, according to a startling report in the Daily Mail. Leaked Pentagon documents suggest a $264 million upgrade of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk will end with US nuclear weapons on British soil for the first time since they were removed under Barack Obama in 2008.
The bombs would be aimed at ‘facing down Putin’, the paper claims. The revelation comes just weeks after Trump ordered the US military to resume nuclear testing for the first time in more than 30 years, fuelling fears of a dangerous new global arms race.
From the moment he first rolled into the White House in 2017, the discourse surrounding Trump and the nuclear arsenal has oscillated between dark comedy and barely suppressed dread. People assume that he is either too dim to grasp the apocalypse that nuclear weapons promise or, having grasped it, too erratic to resist the seductive glow of the launch codes.
But Trump and the nuclear threat have history. He was born within months of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During his school days, ‘duck and cover’ civil defence drills were commonplace in US classrooms. As the world held its breath during the 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis, Trump was in his easily-influenced teenage years.
He tells us often that his understanding of nuclear matters was shaped through long conversations with his uncle, Dr John G. Trump. ‘I used to discuss nuclear with him all the time’, said Trump. He describes his late uncle as ‘a brilliant man’ who gave him ‘very good genetics’. The New Yorker has identified five times where Trump praised his uncle’s genes, which he is thought to believe bequeathed him a unique insight into nuclear weapons.
In the 1980s, after a jaunt to the Soviet Union, the future president convinced himself he had the singular genius to negotiate global nuclear disarmament. ‘It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to know about missiles,’ he told the Washington Post. ‘I think I know most of it anyway.’
In the 1990s, he told Playboy magazine that he’s ‘always thought about the issue of nuclear war’, describing it as ‘a very important element in my thought process’. He also compared the nuclear threat to an illness no one wants to talk about it.
But he continues to talk about it. Theresa May was one of his first visitors in the White House. She tried to talk to him about climate change but he said ‘the greatest risk to climate is nuclear winter’, telling her about images he’d seen of nuclear explosions melting granite. It seems likely that Trump is haunted by the bomb. The question is whether this haunting restrains him or merely feeds the drama he so cherishes.
We should recall that in 2016 he reportedly startled a foreign policy expert by repeatedly asking, ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’ His campaign team denied the exchange, but when asked later whether he could imagine circumstances under which he might resort to nuclear arms, he replied: ‘Possibly. Possibly.’
During his first term he rattled his nuclear sabres, warning North Korea that it could face ‘fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen’. He followed up with a boast that America’s nuclear weapons are ‘far stronger and more powerful than ever before’.
But every president has the capacity for transformation. Ronald Reagan, after viewing the 1983 television film The Day After, admitted in his diary that it left him ‘greatly depressed.’ More importantly, it shepherded him toward the ‘Reagan reversal’: the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was the first pact to abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons.
Trump, characteristically, withdrew from that very treaty during his first term. But he is said to have recently read Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario, a meticulous reconstruction of how a nuclear exchange might consume the world within an hour. The fictional president of this account does not fare well – and one wonders whether this detail, more than the billions incinerated, might give Trump pause.
Could the book spark a ‘Trump reversal’? Does the man who fancies himself as history’s greatest deal-maker still imagine negotiating the ultimate deal: the end of the nuclear age? I won’t hold my breath, but stranger things have happened – and with Trump, they usually do.
Comments