Nuclear weapon

Donald Trump has exercised the nuclear option, sort of. Sitting somewhere in South Korea, the President launched a Truth Social post on the topic of nukes: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” Then he thanked the world for its attention and sallied into a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping. That timing isn’t coincidental. The Red Dragon has spent the last decade hoarding nuclear warheads – almost as if there were a second Cold War raging – and has been rather brazen about this fact. So too has Xi’s pouty neighbor to the north, Vladimir Putin.

It’s August 6, which means that it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.   Every year at this time there are a spate of articles about that horrific event. Some of the articles are condemnatory; some hand-wringing; some are defiantly supportive.  This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.   Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L.

Yoon Suk-yeol isn’t a household name in the United States, but his comments this week have put him in the international spotlight. Speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday, the South Korean president openly surmised that if North Korea’s nuclear weapons program continued unabated, Seoul may have to explore an option the United States wouldn’t like: producing nuclear weapons of its own. Referring to Pyongyang’s weapons programs, Yoon said, "It’s possible that the problem gets worse and our country will introduce tactical nuclear weapons or build them on our own. If that’s the case, we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities.” The remarks generated immediate pushback from nuclear security experts.

Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that he was not bluffing about using nuclear weapons against the West in his war on Ukraine is one of the strongest indications yet of the risks the liberal world now faces in opposing authoritarian aggression. In the face of Russian aggression, or in committing the United States to defending Taiwan, as President Joe Biden did yet again recently, Washington and its partners face the possibility of direct confrontation with the world’s most powerful, nuclear-armed militaries. For the first time in a generation, Western powers risk being checked by adversaries willing to threaten massive conventional and nuclear warfare. The era of cost-free intervention to uphold the liberal world order is over.

The Atlantic alliance hasn’t always been quite as special as politicians on both sides of the sea like to pretend. To take just the last sixty years: there were the differing views on Vietnam that led Lyndon Johnson to assess the British premier Harold Wilson as "a creep," while Richard Nixon privately considered Ted Heath "weak" and "as crooked as a corkscrew" (which was saying something coming from him). In October 1962, however, the principal Western leaders really did have something special. Between them, they probably helped save the world from nuclear annihilation. When on October 16, President John F.

What’s more alarming than President Trump trying to frighten Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury”? President Biden trying to frighten Americans with Putin. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” the president riffed at a New York fundraiser, while fretting to supporters about his need to find that elusive off-ramp for the Russians. Biden’s loose talk about Putin’s formidability contrasted with US handwringing fits a pattern. Pervasive throughout Putin’s war has been far too much focus on what the United States should do to help Putin find these mythical off-ramps, and on how to restrain Ukraine to prevent it from getting nuked.

At a swanky fundraiser in Manhattan, President Joe Biden alluded to the prospect of “Armageddon.” The biblical reference was not intended to woo the Christian evangelicals who form part of the base of the Republican Party, but to alert bien-pensant liberal opinion that something a trifle more threatening than global warming looms large in world politics. For the “first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going," Biden said. For anyone with lingering memories of the Cold War, his remarks about the prospect that Russian president Vladimir Putin might reach for the nuclear button was bound to stir alarm coupled with — dare I say it? — a smidgen of pleasure.