Even the London financial crowd must be somewhat taken aback by U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent call for nuclear weapons testing. In an editorial on Nov. 4 in Financial Times entitled, “The New Nuclear Arms Race,” the editors lament the fact that Trump’s statement last week that the U.S. would resume testing “on an equal basis” with Russia and China “wrongfooted his own officials as much as it did Beijing and Moscow.” The Pugwashian London oligarchs are not simply totally enthralled with the Cold War era’s games of “Russian roulette” which characterized the arms control “choreography,” but are more concerned about the ability of the Russian leader to use “nuclear blackmail” to “deter NATO countries from intervening and supplying the most lethal weapons to Kyiv,” which these gentlemen would of course like to see happen. Also, these cost-minded plutocrats note that “Nuclear weapons are not only abhorrent, but ruinously expensive.” War on the cheap is more appealing for your “savvy investor.”
Nevertheless, their advice ought to be taken to heart by a U.S. President who seems to have lost his way. Concluding their arguments, the editors write: “Whatever Trump’s justifiable frustrations with Putin in his efforts to end the Ukraine war and regardless of China’s position today, the U.S. President ought to engage with Moscow on extending New START as a step towards rebuilding arms control. Making decisive progress towards that goal would be a far better way of earning the Nobel Peace Prize he craves than ending the long taboo on weapons testing”—or starting a world war, one might add. Good advice whatever the motive, but the hope is that such a step will lead not to the return to the type of arms control “balance of power” that the world had experienced for so many unnerving decades, but rather to the creation of an “indivisible” security architecture based on trust and cooperation, in which all the countries on the planet can feel secure.
