Mr. Trump Flirts With an Arms Race

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opinion/mr-trump-flirts-with-an-arms-race.html

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One day after sending shock waves around the globe with an alarming tweet about how the United States must “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability,” President-elect Donald Trump elaborated, and managed only to deepen the world’s fears.

“Let it be an arms race,” he said in a phone conversation with Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC on Friday. He then warned nuclear adversaries that the United States “will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

With less than a month to go before he becomes president — and inherits the power to unleash the world’s deadliest weapons — Mr. Trump is playing a risky game. He is casually hinting at a seismic shift in fundamental, complex policies about the role nuclear weapons play in the defense of the United States and its allies. And his comments seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction to President Vladimir Putin, who on Thursday had vowed to strengthen Russia’s nuclear missiles in a speech to his military commanders.

For decades, American policy has been designed to stabilize relations between Russia and the United States and to deter other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Careless taunts risk undoing that progress.

Over the years, American presidents have worked with their Russian counterparts to reduce their nuclear arsenals from a high of 30,000 American warheads in the mid-1960s and 40,000 Russian warheads in the mid-1980s to roughly 7,000 each today. And no one has pursued those reductions more aggressively than the Republicans. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan even talked with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, about getting rid of all nuclear weapons.

Under the 2010 New Start Treaty, the United States and Russia can deploy no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads each. When President Obama took office, he envisioned a world without nuclear weapons but, in time, settled on a more realistic goal of 1,100 deployed warheads, which would still leave more than enough power to devastate any country that considers attacking the United States or its allies. He was unable to reach that goal because Russia refused further negotiations.

A new arms race would also sap the credibility of Washington’s efforts to prevent the spread of these weapons. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty requires the five major nuclear weapons states — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — to move toward disarmament in exchange for other countries’ promises not to acquire them.

The arms race comment was not Mr. Trump’s only unsettling musing on defense. He has asked why America has nuclear weapons if it can’t use them and has even suggested that it wouldn’t be bad for Japan to develop its own nuclear arsenal.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group that has former Senator Sam Nunn as a co-chairman and that seeks to reduce nuclear dangers, said in a recent report that the risk of using nuclear weapons either by accident or by miscalculation is greater than at any other period since the Cold War in part because the two sides have not been talking about these issues for some time. On Friday, Mr. Putin said he was not looking for a new arms race. Instead of engaging in macho competition, Mr. Trump should seek a new dialogue with Russia on reducing nuclear dangers.