The Ticking Nuclear Budget Time Bomb
Kingston Reif and Mackenzie Eaglen
October 25, 2018
In a little-noticed comment before his controversial July summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump expressed a desire to talk to his Russian counterpart about their countries’ extensive nuclear modernization plans. Trump characterized his own government’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade the aging nuclear arsenal as “a very, very bad policy.†He seemed to express some hope that the two countries, which together possess over 90 percent of the planet’s nuclear warheads, could chart a different path and avert a new arms race.
Still, it’s not clear Trump is actually interested in a different path. He said on Monday, in the context of his decision to withdraw the United States from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, that “We have far more money than anybody else by far. We’ll build [the U.S. nuclear arsenal] up until†other nuclear-armed states such as Russia and China “come to their senses.â€
https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/the-ticking-nuclear-budget-time-bomb/
