Could Trump help unleash nuclear catastrophe with a single Tweet?

Donald Trump’s alarming Tweet about his desire to “greatly strengthen and expand” the “nuclear capability” of the United States unleashed a frenzy of media efforts to try to divine his actual policy intentions. It forced some of his advisers into tortured claims that Trump didn’t say what he actually said, even as others simultaneously insisted that Trump did meaningfully put other countries on notice that if he deems them to be challenging our supremacy, they will face an arms race.

But perhaps the most worrisome thing about Trump’s nuclear Tweet is not the intention to break with decades of international disarmament efforts that it may have signaled, though that’s frightening enough on its own. Rather, it’s that he saw fit to Tweet about nuclear weapons at all.

As we prepare for President Trump to take near-unchecked control of our nuclear machinery, his nuclear Tweet is best seen as a window into his temperament. Trump still does not appreciate that every word he utters carries tremendous weight and could have dramatic, untold, far-reaching, unpredictable consequences — something that is especially true in the nuclear arena. Or, perhaps worse, Trump may be entirely indifferent to this fact.

Arms control experts I spoke with suggested that Trump’s willingness to Tweet about nuclear weapons raises the possibility of Trump doing the same as president — and more to the point, the possibility of him doing so amid some species of international crisis or escalation.

Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, points out that in peacetime, any belligerent Trump Tweet about nuclear weapons might not appear as alarming, simply because “confirmation bias” might lead key actors not to interpret it in its most frightening light at that moment. Amid rising international tensions, though, that confirmation bias might work in the other direction, he says.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/12/26/could-trump-help-unleash-nuclear-catastrophe-with-a-single-tweet/