The 2024 Election and Nuclear Arms Control
by Jason Sibert
The 2024 election is months away, and it involves the risks posed by nuclear weapons, although voters aren’t thinking much about it, most likely.
Writer Darryl Kimball addressed the upcoming election issues in his story “Nuclear Dangers and the 2024 Election.” How the winner of the 2024 race will handle the evolving array of nuclear weapons-related challenges is difficult to discuss now. Still, the records and policies of the leading contenders, President Joe Biden, and former President Donald Trump, offer some clues.
A major responsibility for any President is to avoid events that can lead to a nuclear war with Russia over its war on Ukraine and with China on possible aggression over Taiwan. One indicator of Trump’s more confrontational approach came in 2019 when, at a meeting of senior officials from the five nuclear-armed states recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), China proposed a joint statement reiterating that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Two years later, Biden administration officials successfully pressed the group to reaffirm this Reagan-Gorbachev idea, first suggested in 1985.
Since then, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine and threats of nuclear use have raised worries about nuclear war. It’s a good thing that President Joe Biden has not issued nuclear counterthreats and has backed Ukraine in its struggle to repel Russia’s invasion. In 2022, Biden also joined leaders of the Group of 20 states in declaring that the use of nuclear weapons and threats of their use are “inadmissible.”
Well before Putin’s nuclear rhetoric was as bad as it is now, Trump engaged in an alarming exchange of taunts with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in 2017. His threats of unleashing “fire and fury” against Pyongyang fueled tensions on the Korean peninsula. They provided another clue of how he might behave in a second term in a crisis with China, North Korea, or Russia.
Kimball said: “Effective US leadership on arms control will be critical to avoid a destabilizing, three-way arms race after the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires in 2026. As the treaty’s first expiration deadline of February 5, 2021, was approaching, Trump refused to agree to a simple extension of the pact, focusing instead on a failed effort to cajole China into joining Russian-U.S. arms talks. This left the incoming Biden administration only days to reach a deal with the Kremlin to extend the pact by five years, and it did.” Last summer, the Biden administration proposed talks with Russia “without preconditions” on a new, post-2026 “nuclear arms control framework.” If there is war in Ukraine, the best outcome likely is a simple deal committing both sides to stay below the current limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads until a longer-term framework is concluded. Biden has also pursued nuclear risk reduction talks with China, which continues its nuclear buildup that began during the Trump era. In November, senior Chinese and U.S. officials held the first such talks in years.
Meanwhile, Iranian leaders continue increasing their capabilities to produce weapons-grade uranium to counter Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw unilaterally from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and impose tougher U.S. sanctions to pressure Tehran into negotiating a new deal. They are now threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty if the US or other UN Security Council members snap back international sanctions against Iran. Biden’s efforts to restore mutual compliance with the 2015 deal have been countered by Iran. Avoiding a more severe crisis over Iran’s nuclear program will require more sophisticated U.S. diplomacy instead of a disastrous war.
In 2024, the candidates’ approaches to these dangers deserve much scrutiny. Presidential leadership may be the most important factor that determines whether the risk of nuclear arms racing, proliferation, and war will rise or fall in the years ahead. We must remember this fact when we head to the polls this fall.
But a larger question needs to be asked: regardless of one’s feelings on the upcoming election, how do we move to a lawful and peaceful world in the long term? Things certainly don’t look good in the short term.
