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Trump has announced that the US will resume nuclear testing and I feel like I’m losing my mind.
This resumption follows quite naturally from a bellicose MAGA worldview that assumes the antagonistic-security fallacy: That security is a scarce resource you acquire by redirecting insecurity toward others.1 I predicted this publicly, and yet I’m nevertheless caught off guard by Trump’s unbridling of the most violent terror-weapon ever created on the basis of something other than facts and reason.
In the statement above, Trump is connecting words together in ways that lead to a morbid high-stakes punchline despite having no coherence. Russia has a slightly larger stockpile than the US. Only North Korea has tested nuclear weapons in the 21st century. The Department of Energy—not the Pentagon—manages nuclear testing. And China’s nuclear arsenal will not reach parity with the US in the next 5 years. Just as with Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs that were actually one-way impositions of economic coercion, Trump’s nuclear testing “on an equal basis” has nothing to do with equality or proportionality but rather the opposite.
Perhaps the most pervasive critique of Trump 1.0 was that Trumpism wielded a firehose of disinformation and propaganda—“alternative facts.” For a while, it was just words. Increasingly, though, those words are coming with great cost, misusing the immense power of the national security state on the basis of gibberish and lies.
We should be unsettled by the idea that a multi-trillion-dollar complex of mass extinction exists at all. We should be even more troubled by the fact that this nuclear enterprise is to be guided by something other than logic and evidence.
And yet, this decision to resume nuclear testing should worry us at a still more profound level.
Put aside, for a moment, the precariousness of nuclear “stability” and the dozens of nuclear crises that could have ended in Armageddon if not for luck. Bracket off too a truism I have said many times: One man’s deterrence is another man’s escalation. The indictment goes deeper, for nuclear testing is not harmless; it is a sacrificial form of nuclear use.
In the first half of the Cold War, the US conducted 105 nuclear tests in the Pacific Islands region, 67 of which were in the Republic of the Marshall Islands—a former US “administrative territory” (colony) turned semi-sovereign nation subordinate to a US sphere of influence. That the US concentrated nuclear testing there wasn’t a fluke; it was because the US has treated the Pacific as a sacrifice zone in its national-security thinking for more than a century.
25,000 Marshallese were exposed to nuclear fallout—a rounding error in the calculus of Cold War liberalism. Doubling down on unaccountable harm, in subsequent decades, the US used the Marshall Islands as a dumping ground for nuclear waste shipped from Nevada, the refuse of uranium mining and nuclear experimentation on Native American territory. Today, the Marshallese seek reparation from a US government that simply won’t hear it.
But what we do to our fellows we do to ourselves.
Trump is wantonly reactivating this particular aspect of America’s legacy of mass sacrifice without consent, rendering absurd the notion of justice under the mythical benefit of nuclear deterrence.
Scott Sagan has written prolifically about nuclear weapons, but his most important contribution might also be his most overlooked. In 2023, he published an article called “Just and Unjust Nuclear Deterrence.” In it, he proposed that making nuclear deterrence more compatible with justice should entail five principles:
Do not target nuclear weapons against civilian populations.
Never use nuclear weapons to attack something that can be destroyed with conventional weapons.
Never use nuclear weapons as revenge attacks.
Refuse nuclear responses to biological or cyber attacks, no matter the scale.
Work in good faith toward nuclear disarmament.
I find it hard to accept that there can be any justice in a system over which human beings exercise highly imperfect control and that perpetually holds our species’ existence at risk of elimination. But Sagan’s prescriptions are a pragmatic minimum for something more just than what we have known in my lifetime. Every person who works in the nuclear field should think of themselves as working against the greater good, their humanity even, if they are ever at cross-purposes with Sagan’s criteria.
Alas, US nuclear policy does not embrace any of these criteria. But what is especially damning about the darkness enveloping us now, as made evident by Trump’s nuclear testing announcement, is that nobody can be under the illusion that the US is working in good faith toward nuclear disarmament.
To the contrary, the US national security state, under the counter-revolutionary stewardship of MAGA, shows reverence neither for law nor life nor consistent logic. That truth about our dark heart invalidates nuclear deterrence because it makes it an excuse to perpetuate injustice until the day its system of death comes to claim us all.
The other two principles of the MAGA worldview are that civilizational (racial) clashes are inevitable, and primitive accumulation is a valid mode of exploitation and extraction.
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