Omar Alansari-Kreger
March 2025:
Is Donald Trump to be taken seriously when openly speaking of denuclearization? The Center for Public Integrity reported in an article from 2020 on the future of warfare that the nuclear weapons industry under Trump’s first term flourished to heights not seen since before the end of the Cold War. He effectively catapulted an aggressive nuclear rearming of America at an estimated 1.7 trillion-dollar cost to the American taxpayer. Despite the massive cost, politicians like Republican Senator Deb Fischer argued that the nuclear rearming of America in a multipolar world is to be considered an essential but not sufficient national security imperative, implying the 1.7 trillion-dollar price tag for the nuclear rearming of America is substantively insufficient.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction has been phased out for defense imperatives espousing limited nuclear exchanges to make nuclear wars winnable in the tiny minds of their high browed planners. Such thinking is reliant on fantastical delusions where limited nuclear exchanges have no tangible correlation with likely escalation into protracted regional conflicts and larger global wars. The naïve reasoning assumes that once both sides pepper themselves with small tactical nuclear weapons, diplomacy will prevail as a matter of practical necessity, bringing both warring parties to the negotiating table and thus preventing a nuclear winter. The expectation here demands that a perverse rationality will prevail before the unthinkable reality of nuclear holocaust is rendered possible even though nuclear weapons would have already been used, turning their irradiated targets into environmental wastelands.
Naturally, the illogicality of such thinking speaks for itself but not to warmongering Machiavellian state actors lost in misinformed mind spaces that nuclear conflicts, even in their most limited capacities, can be won as decisive Napoleonic victories.
This begs the existential question:
Is the maturity of humanity determined by our moral codes reliable enough to manage the destructive power of technological advancement as evidenced in the development of weapons of mass destruction?
It is therefore all too reasonable to argue that the rate and rapidity of technological change dwarfs the adaptability of humanity to deal with such changes. This is made most evident in thinking that unconventional conflicts can be fought and won using conventional means. Time and time again, history reminds us that the great war machines of mighty empires meet their match in protracted guerilla conflicts; reaffirming unconventionality is a re-emergent truism of warfare where standard conventions are routinely ignored and circumvented to achieve decisive victories while forever changing how we think of warfare. This proved particularly true of atomic warfare after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was justified as a benign means to serve a humanitarian purpose that in this case was centered on ending World War Two and to prevent further casualties exceeding the deaths of both cities.
Problem, reaction, solution is thought to be the most effective means available to humanity to solve great existential crises that otherwise threaten mankind’s survival. For physicists behind the Manhattan Project, ranging from Robert Oppenheimer to Richard Feynman, the development of the world’s first atomic weapons followed a different pattern of successive causation defined as: problem, solution, and reaction, as high priority was given to end World War before the Nazis could develop their own atomic weapons.
The most iconic names of twentieth century science not only made the atomic age possible, but understood the true power and scale of nuclear war centered on its existential futility. Robert Oppenheimer not only advocated for supranational control of nuclear weapons and arsenals but opined that the abject lack of any political program specific to the developmental management of nuclear weapons was in of itself an existential tragedy for humanity. To paraphrase Oppenheimer, in the aftermath of the Triny Bomb Test on July 16th, 1945: “if nuclear arsenals are to be the implements of modern war, the people of the world must unite or perish.” Additionally, Albert Einstein echoed similar discontent stating: “I know not how World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones.”
With that in mind, has humanity given ample time and consideration to consider the profundity of such statements in our respective educational forums, national conventions, and international summits?
As far as American high school students are concerned how widely discussed and understood are such statements on nuclear war in terms of its existential imminence?
Denuclearization cannot be achieved without the internationalization of nuclear weapons arsenals which must begin at the United Nations Security Council and include aims of reforming the Security Council itself into a new suborganization subordinate to the General Assembly, with the high imperative of eradicating nuclear weapons by internationalizing each P5 arsenal. This would be achieved with an established deadline set for the near future while developing the necessary technologies among international partners like the United States, Russia, and China to make nuclear war a practical impossibility. Such grand policy aspirations can derive inspiration from the American inspired Atoms for Peace Program from the 1950s designed to convert decommissioned nuclear arsenals for peaceful purposes with plans to serve rather than destroy civilization, through a specialized subagency attached to the International Atomic Energy Agency for this purpose.
It takes minimal imagination to perceive how this specific prescription for the supranational consolidation of nuclear arsenals could depend on some great existential threat to humanity to achieve any credible traction. That threat may prove more practical than previously thought imaginable. No, that danger will not originate from some extraterrestrial threat to humanity from some distant galaxy. The Washington based Atlantic Council suggested in February of 2024 that a more opportune time for supranational nuclear weapons consolidation could be, when a P5 member like Russia becomes too unstable to manage its own nuclear arsenal, as the reality of another Soviet style collapse descends on Moscow when its faltering government, economy, and military gives to the stresses of kleptocratic collapse. The supranational consolidation of nuclear weapons will begin as a practical regimen of cooperation to deny rouge nonstate actors the ability to create a dystopian future of nuclear winter.
In Trump’s warped mind, the abolition of nuclear warfare will be achieved by threatening limited nuclear war despite the implicit illogicality of such thinking. To neo-Machiavellian hawks undergirded by Napoleonic power complexes, like Donald Trump, the thinking of scientific giants from the 20th century like Oppenheimer and Einstein are definitively alien if not downright repugnant. Rather, they advocate for a world where destructive power becomes an acceptable aspect of hegemonic empire. It must be made clear; our future deserves better if humanity is to prevail.
Omar Kreger (Alansari-Kreger)
