Jack Dickens (JD) — Are we now living in a new nuclear age?

Fiona Hill (FH) — I do believe we are living in a new nuclear age. The old forms of deterrence, the interest in constraining the number of nuclear powers, and the way that countries talk about, and even try to deploy nuclear weapons politically, have all shifted somewhat. During the Cold War, there were essentially five permanent nuclear powers, but only two that really dominated the international stage – the United States and the Soviet Union. And they were always basically engaged in a series of negotiations that were really about them in their entirety. The other three nuclear powers – China, the United Kingdom, and France – were at best a kind of novelty act, and ultimately mattered mostly in terms of their relationship to the United States or the Soviet Union.

Of course, things have changed dramatically since the peak of the Cold War. We have had the proliferation of nuclear weapons, with several countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or, like Iran and North Korea, forging ahead to pursue their own nuclear programmes, or certainly developing the missile capability that could quite easily be transformed into nuclear weapons. And China, obviously, is trying to seek parity, and is well on the way to doing that with the United States and Russia as well. So, it’s no longer an age that’s just about two superpowers making decisions for the rest of the world.

JD — Is there a sense that the codes and rules that nuclear-armed nations used to abide by have unravelled and can’t be put back together again?

FH —  I don’t know if we can say that they can’t be put back together again, but, look, it’s certainly changed really quite dramatically with the war in Ukraine. One could always say that, actually, in India and Pakistan’s case, there’s always that threat of a potential nuclear exchange hovering over their various military confrontations. One might also think that could be the case when you have India and China facing off across the Himalayas, although nobody’s really, I think, seriously factored that in. It’s always talked about in slightly hushed tones.

But in the case of Russia in Ukraine, I think we’re pretty certain that Vladimir Putin was contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in 2022, when the tide was turned against the Russian military, when they were pinned down on the ground in the Kherson region and around the Dnipro River. We’ll all recall that there was analysis and all kinds of discussions at the time about whether Putin was willing to detonate a small-yield tactical nuclear weapon in that context. He wanted to use it as a game changer on the battlefield, and he amped up the rhetoric. That is, I think, very important.

During the Cold War era, we got very close to the contemplation of a nuclear exchange in 1983, during the War Scare that unfolded in the wake of the Abel Archer exercise, which the United States had intended to be purely a deterrent, but which the Soviet Union saw as a rehearsal for a first strike against it. We now know, because of the release of documents, that we were actually pretty close to sparking a catastrophe there. And, of course, there were other close calls throughout the Cold War. But I think we were also more careful and cautious in that period about the way that we resorted to the threat of nuclear war, because there was always a very clear sense that we would face societal annihilation.

Fast forward to 2022, however, and Putin was talking quite openly and loosely about the use of a nuclear weapon and making threats, even when there’d been no change in the strategic perspective. There had been no shift, as we had seen during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Euromissile Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, in the positioning of nuclear weapons. There was no shift in nuclear doctrine. Nor had the United States and other nuclear powers made any major breakthrough in nuclear weapons technologies. His considerations were all purely about battlefield tactics. In other words, Putin was not only threatening to use nuclear weapons, but also clearly contemplating their use for tactical purposes on a battlefield. So, this has changed the whole picture in two ways: both in the rhetorical sense, in terms of the willingness to threaten the use nuclear weapons, and also a real sense, in terms of the actual contemplation of use.

JD — Those who have worked with President Trump, like yourself, have often noted his deep-seated fear of nuclear Armageddon. Where do Trump’s fears – his nuclear nightmares – come from?

FH —  On one level, it’s generational: he’s a typical child of the Cold War. If you also think about his age, most people are at their most impressionable about world events during a certain period in their teens, when they’re coming out of childhood. And for Trump, the key event of that period would, of course, be the Cuban Missile Crisis. And although he obviously led something of a sheltered life, coming as he did from such privilege, he still wouldn’t have been inured to that general atmosphere in the 1960s in the United States, at the real peak of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He grew up in that age, in the 1950s and early 1960s, when people had to practice duck and cover in their classrooms. The Cuban Missile Crisis, from the US perspective, was a pretty critical period. If you talk to people of his same age group, and Joe Biden falls into that category, they were all very impressionable in that period, and it was one that had a huge impact on them.

Then there’s a familial connection. Another important experience for Trump was his discussions, which he refers to all the time, with his uncle, Dr John G. Trump, an electrical engineer at MIT who worked with nuclear physicists, and who apparently tells him everything he knows about nuclear weapons.

Then you put that in the context of the 1980s, when he’s rising up in terms of public recognition as a celebrity business person, but also as someone with political aspirations. If you look at that period I’ve already referenced, with the War Scare of 1983, there was a kind of palpable feeling in political and pop culture, and just in society writ large, that something was amiss. It’s in that period that the TV film The Day After (1983) was watched by millions, depicting the US on the brink, and in immediate aftermath of, a nuclear war. There was also the British TV show Threads (1984), which is about a massive nuclear attack on Sheffield.

Trump is very much a man who visualises things and sees everything in a television context. I’m sure that he would have seen The Day After. These films may seem primitive now, but they gave a lot of people a visualisation of what nuclear war is likely to be, far more so than the grainy films from the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In the films from the 1980s, it felt far more real. I’m sure that such depictions and images, and others like them, left an impression on Trump. These depictions were the result of the War Scare and the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States over the placement of SS-20 and Pershing missiles in Europe. When all is considered, you get the feeling that this moment, in 1983 to 1984, is a turning point for Trump.

Then, not long after, in 1987, he visited the Soviet Union for the first time. And that’s the period when he starts to become convinced, in some respects, that he can help negotiate an end to this nuclear standoff. So, he starts to have interviews in prominent publications and newspapers. He takes out ads in the press. He starts to think about running for political office. Notably, he makes one of his first presidential bids in this period. And then, of course, he goes to the Soviet Union, ostensibly to talk about business development, but it’s really, I think, to engage with the Soviets, to try to put himself into that kind of position where he becomes the guy who can negotiate the end of nuclear weapons.

He talks about this in interactions that I’ve witnessed – this idea that he’s always understood more about nuclear weapons than anyone else; that he somehow just has some sort of genetic predisposition towards being a genius at understanding nuclear weapons from his uncle at MIT. He always talked of this visualisation, an image that he had in his mind, of nuclear explosions melting granite, and I think this is also from the depictions of those 1980s films. I recall one episode where he had a meeting with Theresa May, who was then British Prime Minister, and she was trying to talk to him about climate change. To which Trump basically said, ‘the greatest risk to climate is nuclear winter.’ And then he said, ‘I’ve seen those images. Have you seen them, Theresa, the ones with melting granite?’ And she said, ‘Yes, yes, you know, Donald, I’ve seen the same thing.’ It wasn’t clear to me whether he was talking about Threads or The Day After, or something else that he’d seen, but it was clear that it was very important to him – it was a terrifying, nightmarish image seared into his mind.

This image was also apparently conjured when he was given the codes to the US’ nuclear detonation system, the nuclear ‘football’, because, again, he referenced this. He’s very much a creature of television and film, and fixated on what he sees.

So, to emphasise once more, Trump thinks the greatest catastrophe for mankind is a nuclear exchange – not climate change, and not any of the other things that we might be concerned about. It was very evident throughout my time working with him during his first term as president that he was forged by the ideas of the 1980s, and, naturally, anybody who lived through that period would be very cognisant of the risk of nuclear war. This was the formative decade for a whole generation of people, including myself. Incidentally, this was the moment when I decided to go and study Russian, and also became obsessed with the idea of what you could do about nuclear arms regulation, arms control.

Trump is a bit sympathetic to the idea of ‘nuclear zero’. He would, if he could, abolish nuclear weapons and get rid of them all. He talks about this as well. In fact, he often references the idea that Reagan and Gorbachev were very close to giving up all nuclear weapons at one point (although, the history of these negotiations is really much more complicated). Still, it appears that this is a running theme for him, going all the way back to the interviews that he gave in the 1980s and through his business outreach in the Soviet Union.

JD —  Is there a discernible ‘Trump doctrine’ when it comes to nuclear weapons? Can we see a particular pattern in how he approaches nuclear issues?

FH —  The common thread is him. He believes that he has this special set of talents and an inherent understanding of nuclear weapons, bequeathed from his uncle. And, as in everything that Trump really focuses on, nuclear rearmament is presented as a threat to absolutely everything, and he believes that he, personally, is the answer – because of the force of his charisma, the way that people respect him, his massive accomplishments, his celebrity, and his ability to make deals. That is really the secret to everything. And so, right from the very beginning of Trump 1.0, once he gets into the presidency, his whole goal is to sit down with Vladimir Putin and to negotiate nuclear weapons. And he believes that he’s following on from the Reagan-Gorbachev negotiations of the 1980s and trying to basically finish them off.

In fact, Trump’s idolisation of Reagan is relevant in another sense. His recent announcement of a ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence system is another echo of the 1980s  – it resembles, in some ways, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the ‘Star Wars’ programme, pursued by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. The whole idea behind the SDI was protection – protection from rogue states, rogue missiles, and protection for NATO and other countries aligned with the United States. Although, crucially, the Soviets always believed it was another effort to outmanoeuvre, and basically neuter, Russia’s nuclear capabilities.

Trump’s vision is slightly different to Reagan’s: he believes that if you have a system that can intercept missiles, then it will be pointless for anybody else to take shots at you. What he’s wanting to do is to eliminate the idea of war, to make it so that it’s just off limits. It’s not so that the United States can take a first strike against anyone; quite the opposite, it’s the ultimate protection, so that the United States can retreat from the world. Trump wants to take the United States back: he wants to have the armed forces arrayed on the Southern Border to stop immigrants coming in, and he wants a Golden Dome to keep missiles out.

This reinforces the whole idea of somebody who is behaving from an abundance of caution, not somebody who wants to do a first strike. This plays into the whole discussion over Orwellian style spheres of influence. China can be over there. Russia can be over there. We can have a nice, big Golden Dome, and we’ll bring Greenland and Canada and everybody else underneath it. Because, actually, for the Golden Dome to work, you do need control of Greenland, or at least in terms of the aerospace above it, for missile interception.

The danger now is that Putin will look at this, much like the Soviets did with the SDI in the 1980s, and see it as a threat. At the same time, the United States’ allies in Asia and Europe will be afraid that the Golden Dome will allow the Americans to take off and leave everybody else in the lurch, which is likely to fuel rearmament and nuclear proliferation.

JD — You’ve been in the room with Trump when he’s been talking about nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear escalation. You went to Helsinki in 2018 when he sat down with Putin. When he discusses these things, do you get a sense of what is going on his mind? Does he have a coherent strategy or endgame?

FH —  He always brings it back to himself. It’s not abstract for him. It’s very personal, clearly. Most things that he really gets his teeth into are very personal for him. A classic example of this is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987.

The background to that was the Euromissile Crisis, which goes on from 1977 to 1987, a full ten years. The INF treaty was signed in 1987 and that’s the year that Trump is out there visiting the Soviet Union. I went there as a student in that year, and you already felt that things were starting to shift. The INF treaty takes the edge off this standoff over the SS-20s and Pershing missiles. And then, of course, you fast forward to the Moscow Summit of May-June 1988, and Gorbachev and Reagan have put everything on a completely different trajectory.

But in the 2010s we were starting to get back to a period of tensions between the US and Russia again. By the time of the first Trump administration in 2017, the Russians had been violating the terms of the INF Treaty. So, you’ve basically had this treaty for many decades being the cornerstone of nuclear policy and strategic stability in Europe. And now the Russians were violating it because they were trying to test a new category of intermediate range nuclear missiles. There were all these concerns that they might violate the Test Ban Treaty as well. They had been developing this whole range of hypersonics and new categories of missiles that we’re all of aware of now – it just wasn’t out in public yet, because, of course, later, Russia did announce all of this. We’d been going back and forth with the Russians the whole time, trading accusations about violating treaties, and it wasn’t at all productive.

In that early part of the first Trump administration, the decision was made that the US should pull out of INF, and basically renegotiate or negotiate something else. We also had the New START – the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – first signed in 2010. That, of course, wasn’t very popular with the Republicans in Congress and the Senate, and there had been quite a lot of opposition to it. There was a big debate about whether you should have an omnibus treaty that looked at all different aspects of intermediate and strategic weapons, or something much looser in terms of a bilateral agreement with Moscow. Some people actually wanted to have that, and Ambassador John Bolton was one of them. They had this idea, just like they had when they pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty under President Bush in 2001, that the United States should be freed up from all these treaty constraints, and have something looser.

But Trump himself wants to negotiate a whole new array of arms treaties. You know, I would joke that what he wants is the Super Trump Arms Regulation Treaties – or one omnibus treaty that covers intermediate nuclear forces and strategic nuclear forces.

So all of this is going on, and there is obviously an effort to get ahead of things with consultations and negotiations about pulling out of the INF. Then, in 2018, Ambassador Bolton led a team, which included myself, Tim Morrison and some others, to Moscow, to sit down with the Russians and talk about all of this. We got onto the plane and started talking through our strategy: there was an agreed plan that we were also going to be coordinating with European partners because the INF Treaty was so important for European security. And we’re on the plane, and then it became obvious that Trump just couldn’t abide the fact that it wasn’t him going out to go and negotiate this. He didn’t want Bolton or anybody else to take the credit, or to have that moment of successfully negotiating something with Putin.

So, he told a press gaggle that we were going to pull out of the INF. The decision had been made. But this contradicted our plan: we were going to negotiate. We were going to talk to the Russians about what we were going to do next. We were also going to consult with the Europeans. We weren’t going to leave the world abruptly without a nuclear treaty, or some kind of anchor on strategic stability. Some people in the administration did want to just pull out, but that’s not what Trump wanted. He wanted to negotiate this whole array of new treaties. Yet here we were, on the plane to Moscow, and we found out that, yet again, he’s put himself in the middle of it all and said, ‘we’re going to pull out’. So, by the time we get to meet with the Russians, they’ve already learned that we’re going to pull out. And so the question then becomes, what are the terms of that pull out?

In Helsinki in 2018 as well, this was supposed to be kicking off the talks on strategic stability, which is the code name for basically talking to the Russians about mostly nuclear issues. And it all becomes highly personalised because, of course, in the press conference, everybody wanted to talk about Russian interference in the election, and Trump didn’t want to talk about this. He wanted to talk about the fact that he sat down with Putin, in the mode of Reagan and Gorbachev. He wanted to be acknowledged for being the key person who is instrumental in saving the world from nuclear Armageddon. It always has to be about him and it has to be very personalised.

Although, I do have to say that, when it comes to the nuclear portfolio, he did pay attention to key issues. It was one area where Trump did do some of his homework, in terms of paying attention to some of the key points, which wasn’t the case on other issues. That really shows how important it was for him, how personal it was. And, look, he still wants to have some kind of outcome of a major nuclear negotiation with Putin. Of course, the New START treaty has to be renegotiated this year, 2025, because of its expiration in 2026.

JD —  I want to pick up on what you said about strategic stability. Does the US really have an effective nuclear deterrent if Trump is terrified of the risk of escalation, whereas figures like Putin are not? Can the US ensure strategic stability if there is not a credible threat that it might actually use its nuclear arsenal?

FH —  I think that’s the real problem, and I think you could put Joe Biden in that same category, in all honesty. There is a difference between capability and intent. And I think the United States certainly has the capability to deter, but the question is really one of intent. And if you look at somebody like Putin, he obviously believes that if you have the capability, it doesn’t really matter about the intent.

But I think he’s pretty effectively gauged that both President Biden and President Trump were very scared or frightened about the use of nuclear weapons. In fact, they didn’t rhetorically threaten it at all. Biden, in 2022, made it very clear that any US response to Putin using nuclear weapons would be conventional, not nuclear. I mean, there’s always supposed to be ambiguity there – that’s supposed to be part of deterrence. But I think there hasn’t been a lot of ambiguity when it comes to the way that either Biden or Trump have approached this, whereas Putin has made it very clear that he’s quite willing to use tactical nuclear weapons.

Biden and Trump are absolutely from the same generation – I mean, Trump is barely younger than Biden. They’re both forged by the post-World War Two sense of horror surrounding the detonation of a nuclear weapon. That’s completely and utterly shaped them. And so, yes, they’re very vulnerable to somebody like Putin who makes threats below the threshold of intermediate or strategic weapons.

There’s also a clear pattern when it comes to both of them, Biden and Trump, as well. They’re very similar in trying to counter the proliferation of nuclear weapons, not wanting North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons, and in attempting to approach these threats in different ways, and talking other countries, such as South Korea, out of acquiring nuclear weapons. As well as this counter-proliferation push, they’ve both been careful about keeping the rhetoric of nuclear escalation in check.

Again, I think this makes it very clear that, despite the capability, there is no intent on using nuclear weapons. And that means that Vladimir Putin can play in that space, certainly when it comes to the tactical risks and also to frightening everyone. Because if you put ‘avoid nuclear war all costs’ as the number one choice in your decision tree, then of course you’re going to be basically placating the Russians, if you really think that they’re willing to use nuclear weapons.

That’s why we’re in such a mess in Ukraine. It’s very clear to Putin that he’s got everybody where he wants them, that he can play at will with the nuclear sabre rattling, because, at the back of Trump’s and Biden’s minds, there are still all these searing images from the Cold War era. Putin has leaned into that. In fact, in Osaka at the G20, in 2019 – the last meeting between Putin and Trump that I was involved with – he made it very clear to Trump that he intended to bring back the atmosphere of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Euromissile Crisis. And when the war in Ukraine started to heat up, Putin invoked both of these crises, because he knows the psychological impact that they had in the 1960s and in the 1980s.

Ukraine stands there as a testament to the risks of stepping back from your own sovereignty and relying on the good graces of others for your future protection. So, absolutely, the lesson from this is very clear, that if you want to bully your neighbours, take over their territory, and declare war with impunity, get a nuclear weapon. And if you want to make sure that you can really protect yourself, either keep the nuclear weapons that you already have, or get a nuclear weapon.

I think Ukraine becomes a cautionary tale. And the more that Trump dismisses that, the more that he says to Zelensky, ‘you have no cards, you’re only getting missiles from others’, it just reinforces the message. He would have had cards. He would have had the nuclear card to play as well in a different context, and it is highly likely that Putin would have chosen not to invade, and that there would have been some other way to resolve this, in the same way that India and Pakistan back down from confronting each other. So if you’re South Korea, if you’re Japan, if you’re Saudi Arabia, if you’re Turkey, all these other countries that have thought about having nuclear weapons, you’re going to press ahead.

JD —  Is there an irony or a tragedy in Donald Trump’s fears of nuclear Armageddon? Because his stated aim is very idealistic – he wants to end nuclear proliferation. Yet by his actions, he seems to be making proliferation more, and not less, likely.

I think there’s a lot of tragedy about Trump writ large. I feel like we’re living collectively through a Graeco-Roman or Shakespearian tragedy, where the actual, real meaning of the word hubris is on full display. I felt some distinct sympathy towards Trump when I would hear him talk about the threat of nuclear war. He desperately wants to have some kind of major breakthrough on the nuclear front. During his first term, I felt like I was watching an opportunity unfolding that was, frankly, squandered, because you’ve got somebody who genuinely wants to do something, but is so flawed in their approach that the likelihood of a breakthrough is pretty slim, precisely because of the flawed approach. In fact, there is a high likelihood of getting exactly what Trump doesn’t want to have happen, which is tragic. And it’s just because he can’t get a grip on himself.

Obviously, there is a role for personal charisma and personalities in negotiations. But, ultimately, a lot of these issues are technical and they require patience, some real consideration of the facts and doing your homework, which is not really Trump’s strength. Look, if he can pull something off with Russia or Iran, more credit to him. I mean, that would be remarkable. The tragedy of all this is that it would be great for all of us if he actually could succeed. I was willing to give him a tiny scintilla of the benefit of the doubt on Ukraine and Russia for a while, but so far he’s just gone exactly where I feared he would go.