President-elect Donald Trump must play nuclear war games

Most of the world’s nuclear warheads are under the control of Putin, Xi, Modi, and Kim (6,302 out of 11,951). The rise of populist authoritarian states puts a premium on the juncture of interpersonal skills, trans-cultural awareness, and technical knowledge of the retaliatory options by the U.S. President. If American leadership does not appear entirely resolute in its intentions to respond proportionately and promptly to even the smallest nuclear attack against its interests and allies under its nuclear umbrella, then there will be a tangible risk of a new round of nuclear proliferation. The Pentagon must make it a priority to involve President Elect Donald Trump and Vice President Elect J.D. Vance in a series of intensive wargames, to deal with the almost inevitable retaliation and escalation that will result from nuclear weapons use.

Berkeley University professor Kenneth Waltz assured the world in his 1981 monograph More May be Better, that the global proliferation of nuclear weapons causes a maturation of a nuclear-armed country’s leadership, sensitizing it to the grave consequences of nuclear war. Deterrence and restraint would be strengthened because of the complexity of manufacture, and fear of the uncontrolled escalation of nuclear weapons. These constraints would make it impossible for irrational leaders to ever achieve a position of command over these capital weapons. However, three of the nuclear leaders, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, are using their nuclear arsenals as shields behind which they are pursuing territorial changes by military force. For a time, Putin’s threatened use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine was deterred more by uncertainty than the assumption of a near-automatic response by the Joseph Biden administration. Furthermore, a sudden regime collapse in Moscow, Beijing or Pyongyang, may also lead to a vengeful nuclear strike on their neighbors.

Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling and horrifying 2024 account of a nuclear exchange, entitled Nuclear War – A Scenario, was generally poorly-received by professionals in the strategic deterrence business because of its extreme oversimplification of U.S. warfighting capabilities. However, it is a decent simulation of how nuclear war would look if conducted by unfettered authoritarians and poorly-prepared democratic leaders. None of the aforementioned rulers have had the politico-military training to manage the almost impossible challenge of arresting nuclear escalation. As John F. Kennedy discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis, commanding nuclear weapons is very different from the routine of politics on the Hill, navigating communist political committees, or directing the Silovki to loot a post-totalitarian society.

Nobel Prize winning nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling argued that nuclear war could only be won by leaders with an intuitive and empathetic awareness of universal values of human justice. This test for the trait of moral insight, available in Schelling’s ground-breaking 1960 The Strategy of Conflict, which he administered annually to his students at Columbia University, was based on self-interested rationality, and not sentimentality. Since nuclear weapons cannot be defended against and virtually guarantee the de-urbanization and de-industrialization of all belligerent parties, the two leaders must be able to negotiate a principled and fair division of anything over which they are disputing, before escalation takes on a life of its own towards mutual annihilation. Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts has argued that since nuclear weapons represent unlimited power, an object like Taiwan, should instead be divided-up according to the balance of interest, and not the virtually infinite distribution of power. For example, in a war over Taiwan that escalated to include nuclear weapons, Xi and Trump would need to recognize that Taiwan would not be worth a full-scale exchange, and therefore they would dissect it according to the balance of their interests rather than according to the size of their arsenals. This requires a sophisticated cultural appreciation of the balance between Beijing’s compulsion for ethnic unification and civil war termination, versus America’s liberal impulse to defend all democracies.

Do Trump and Xi (or Putin, Kim, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi), both distracted by no holds-barred domestic challenges, have the trans-cultural experience required for this type of high-stakes and rapidly paced negotiations? It takes an inter-continental ballistic missiles no more than 40 minutes to hit its target, 15 minutes for a hypersonic delivery, and 10 minutes for a fractional orbital bombardment warhead to fall out of apogee. Stanford professor James Fearon, in a 1995 article in International Organization, demonstrated the inescapable value of lying in negotiations, highlighting the danger that all of these leaders may be tempted to mimic irrational lunacy to extract more concessions from their adversary. U.S. President Richard Nixon attempted this “Madman Strategy” to signal resoluteness to the USSR in 1969, but he failed to appreciate that the ideologized Soviet security psyche would prevent them from noticing. Furthermore, the rationality of irrationality is almost the perfect accelerant for nuclear escalation since the logical response is to end any talks and conduct an all-out damage limitation counter-force attack.

Certainly the USSR under Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev were hardly beacons of restraint or compromise, the latter having dramatically failed to predict the consequences of deploying nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962. More frightening was Mao Zedong’s Communist China, which detonated its first nuclear weapon in 1964, just four years after his Great Leap Forward program that killed upwards of 30 million peasants. China’s 1966 thermonuclear warhead test and arsenal buildup occurred amid Mao’s subsequent Cultural Revolution, initiated primarily to dislocate his political opponents, and which likely instigated China’s provocative border war with the Soviet Union in 1969. However, communist arsenals confronted a sober U.S. leadership matured by the failure of the 1938 Munich negotiations with Adolf Hitler, and the shocking fall of France in 1940. According to Jeffery Rickelson, author of the 2007 Spying on the Bomb, the Second World War was a race to defeat Nazi Germany before it built its own nuclear arsenal, which would have followed shortly after the capture of Moscow. Wartime negotiations are undoubtedly made more complex by the stark generational differences sweeping through Russia, China and Iran, at the moment. Fortuitously, none of the most threatening leaders are ascetic, as all of Putin (4), Kim (3), and Xi (1) have children. Luckily also, none of Saddam Hussein, F.W. de Klerk, Bashar al-Assad, Masoud Pezeshkian, Slobodan Milosevic, or Volodymyr Zelinsky, possess or possessed nuclear arms.

One of the obvious lessons of the Second World War was the critical role of maintaining alliances to deter threats from revisionist aggressors, like Hideki Tojo’s Japan or Benito Mussolini’s Italy, primarily because deterrence is an order of magnitude cheaper than war. A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, in their 1980 The War Ledger, calculated that even victors of wars lose 5-7 years of their growth, whereas the defeated can lose up to 25 years, if they survive. It could take up to a century to return to the status quo ante after a global nuclear war, even if it only affected the Eurasian landmass and North America. This author and three of his university tutorial students struggled for four months through the emotionally exhausting 1977 SPI simulation After the Holocaust, in which the players confront starvation, industrial retrogression, secessionism, and foreign encroachment, to rebuild the U.S. after a devastating nuclear attack.

Trump’s contention that NATO, and especially Canada, is not bearing its fair share of the defense burden, is a recurring historical truism. However, the Cold War taught a second lesson that if alliances are withdrawn abruptly, countries will build their own nuclear arsenals, which are within easy reach of most industrialized states, such as North Korea. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s desertion of South Vietnam, because it looked like an abandonment of U.S. commitments to Asia, led directly to preliminary nuclear bomb research in the mid-1970s in both South Korea and Taiwan, and influenced Japan to get the acquiescence of the Ronald Reagan administration to build their Rokkasho nuclear reprocessing facility. A clumsy U.S. retreat from NATO will very likely trigger immediate nuclear proliferation in Poland, Sweden, and Turkey. Proliferation will undermine both the Immediate and General Deterrence strategy of the U.S.

The main purpose of nuclear weapons is Immediate Deterrence, where an enemy state is threatened with punishment if it conducts an attack, such as by China on Taiwan. In reality, this calculation is far more complex as Beijing is likely to use its nuclear arsenal in the form of a retaliatory shield to chaperone in its amphibious landing force onto Taiwan. To this end, the number of strategic warheads in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is essentially determined by a calculation of the number of enemy cities, warheads destroyed on the ground or at sea by enemy preemption, and weapons needed for post-war negotiation against hostile third parties seeking to exploit the weakness of a nuclear devastated America. Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington even warned that Mexico, where all of its school-age children are taught that a third of their territory awaits liberation in the U.S., may seek an opportunity of reclamation. There is no logical upper limit to the number of tactical nuclear weapons a country can possess, especially when using nuclear depth charges against suspected submarines or surface to air missiles, although the U.S. and USSR have decommissioned most of these.

Another important purpose of a large U.S. nuclear arsenal is General Deterrence, where a major power like the U.S. has such an impressive stockpile that it discourages smaller countries from even conceiving of competition and trying to possess nuclear weapons. This is certainly the case of Brazil, South Korea, Germany, and Japan, which depend on the U.S.’s security umbrella. General Deterrence is vital to U.S.’s grand strategy because proliferation would increase the likelihood of regional nuclear wars, which would instigate further proliferation, which in turn would block U.S. intervention against rogue states. General Deterrence thereby facilitates the U.S.’s three grand strategic objectives: first, enable global maritime commerce to generate middle classes that promote development and democracy, which leads to peace since liberal democracies do not war against each other. Therefore, second, spread democracy faster than the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Third, resist any attempt to unite the Eurasian landmass under a single non-democratic authority.

It is a peculiar world where we look to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari as a moderate nuclear leader. French President Emmanuel Macron is perhaps the most experienced and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is likely the most restrained, but all three of these arsenals are Lilliputian by comparison to the stockpiles of the major powers. Nuclear disarmament will remain beyond reach for at least a generation, as all of the U.S., Russia, China, North Korea, India and Pakistan are ramping up their production of warheads. Israel never stopped, with their arsenal edging from 80 up to 90 units. Iran is also on the knife’s edge of crossing the nuclear threshold, with Saudi Arabia likely to receive Pakistani weapons if it does. Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko probably has nuclear warheads under Russian supervision, in much the same way as the East German army possessed FROG-7 rockets under Soviet control. A firm command of nuclear options by the U.S. President Elect will fortify allies and dissuade opportunists.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.