If Elections Have Consequences, This is Consequential (Part 1)

Or, How We Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

As the daily flood of disinformation, invective, and demented fantasy issuing from Trump’s firehose has morphed into something like napalm, it’s been hard to pay attention to developments with longer term impacts. Two recent such developments, however, both embodying the overused phrase "existential threat", demand our immediate attention.

One, clearly consequential and a consequence of the last election, is the latest assault by the Trump Administration on actions to combat climate change – and more to be said about that in a later post. The arguably greater ultimate threat lies with the other development, the renewed potential for nuclear proliferation, leading to the probability of a new arms race and the possibility of nuclear war. Until recently, that threat still seemed longer term. Now that we’re in the Iran War-That-Isn’t, it feels much more immediate.

The event prompting this essay was the expiration of the last remaining arms control treaty with Russia, the so-called New START, described in a recent Fareed Zakaria Washington Post column. Fareed’s main point is that evolution of both nuclear weapons and their geopolitics has made the treaty – a 2010 update to the series of previous agreements that succeeded the original Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties (SALT) dating back to the 1970’s – essentially outdated, rendering the expiration a mostly symbolic marker. To that I would add, the minimal attention given to its passing underlines the complacency we’ve developed towards these weapons.

“Existential” vs. “Threat”

Back when the Cold War was still hot, the adjective “existential” was seldom applied to “threat” – there was "existentialism," but that mostly evoked esoteric philosophical debates in basement cafés redolent of clove cigarettes and espresso. There was just “The Bomb,” and a five-syllable word was unnecessary to emphasize its danger.

Today, even “existential threat” seems to have become devalued by a kind of verbal inflation, driven by overuse. The potential for nuclear apocalypse has been replaced by zombie horror-fantasies, on one hand, and among a different culture, the Biblical end-of-days. That complacency stems, ironically, from the very success of arms-control efforts over the last 50 years.

As Zakaria points out, never before in human history has a weapon been added to arsenals and left unused (excepting the first time, of course). He credits the last half-century of evolving arms control treaties and clear “deterrence relationships”, but omits the sheer terror of the first fifteen years of the arms race, when little more than the prospect of mutually assured destruction (with the intentionally devised, but never-voiced acronym, MAD) deterred The Bomb’s use.

The development of the various agreements starting in 1972 helped solidify a stability that was based largely on two principal adversaries having almost all the weapons, and doing everything they could to keep them away from others. By 2010, when the New START agreement was signed, conditions had changed, but mostly in the continued direction of easing tensions and reducing arsenal sizes.

Now, a decade and a half later, everything is different. Even if it had been renewed, New START would do little to maintain what has become a very tenuous stability.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Only the US and Russia (or the USSR before it) were parties to these agreements, as the only countries with major nuclear arsenals. Now China is rapidly approaching parity – especially since the US and Russia have reduced their stockpiles – and is little interested in participating in limitations until it does so. Instead of the previous two-party stalemate, rather like two Western gunslingers both with drawn pistols, there is now something resembling the climactic Mexican standoff at the end of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”, with Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes nervously shifting their guns back and forth. I hesitate to cite the outcome of that scene as instructive, but it does indicate how such situations are inherently unstable and unpredictable.

Further, Russia has moved strongly towards smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons, ones whose use wouldn’t necessarily trigger MAD-level retaliation, amassing as much as 1500 short-range missiles. The US abandoned development of this type of weapon back in the 20^th century, despite the lack of any agreement controlling them. Their usefulness to Vladimir Putin to deter US and NATO involvement during the early stages of his war with Ukraine is obvious. Although gradual escalation blunted this threat, they still remain a serious concern, especially for the future.

Finally, the current nine-member “nuclear club” – of which only the original five are parties to the 1968 UN Non-proliferation Treaty – may be on the verge of expanding. In addition to Iran (until recently, that is), many more countries now have the technical ability to produce a nuclear weapon, as many as 40, according to a NY Times estimate[1]. Zakaria mentions both South Korea and Japan as considering acquiring nuclear weapons to deter North Korea’s new capability, in the growing uncertainty about the coverage of America’s nuclear umbrella.

"We are drifting from managed deterrence toward competitive rearmament, from limits toward accumulation, from predictability toward improvisation." - Fareed Zakaria

Far from trying to correct that drift, the Trump administration is steering into it, and if anything, accelerating. Trump’s only comment on the expiration of New START was to call it “a bad deal” that needed to be replaced – not inaccurately, but without any constructive plan to do so, or even to exercise restraint on increasing the US arsenal. Instead, the Navy is arming its largest submarines, limited under New START to 20 nuclear-tipped missiles, with a full complement of 24. For their part, China and Russia are not only expanding and modernizing their arsenals but developing new and inherently destabilizing “superweapons” that include hypersonic missiles, space-based warheads in Earth orbit, and a Russian ultra-long range nuclear undersea drone.

Combined with the US expansion of conventional nuclear weapons and the growing sense among other nations, in Europe as well as Asia, that they now need to develop their own nuclear arsenals, this portends a new arms race that is potentially the greatest threat to global stability since the beginning of the Cold War. Not to mention, as well, the raised prospect of armageddon.

Post-Existentialism, anyone?

[1] Sanger, DE and Broad, WJ, “Nuclear Arms Control Era Comes to End Amid Global Rush for New Weapons”, NY Times, 5 February 2026 [ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/us/politics/new-start-nuclear-arms-control.html?smid=url-share ]