Trump wouldn't be first to weigh nukes: Marc Ambinder

Donald Trump has been excoriated over a report that he asked a foreign policy adviser why the U.S. couldn't actually ever use nuclear weapons. "If we have them, why can’t we use them?" Trump asked, according to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.

While the Trump camp denied the report, almost surely he would not have been the first presidential candidate to break the nuclear taboo by asking those questions. He certainly would not be the first president to think about how nuclear weapons might be used offensively as a policy weapon.  

In the summer and early fall of 1969, President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cooked up a plan, code-named Giant Lance, to try to jar the Soviets into pressuring the government of North Vietnam to negotiate more fruitfully with the U.S. How would they do this? They'd place U.S. nuclear forces on alert, seemingly randomly, for no good reason. The Soviets would detect this and assume that Nixon was crazy. They would reason: If Nixon was crazy, what else might he do with nuclear weapons? This fear would cause them to capitulate, to soften their tone, to comply. Who would negotiate with a madman?

In October of that year, the "readiness" alerts began, confusing even senior nuclear commanders in the USA who had not been apprised of the reasons. But they followed orders. The Soviets did indeed notice. They were indeed confused. But they did not react as Nixon had anticipated. They decided not to put their own forces on alert. Instead, as Jeffrey Kimball and William Burr report in their 2015 book, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, the Soviets dispatched their ambassador to ask Kissinger what the hell Nixon was doing. Nixon’s flirtation with coercive nuclear diplomacy did not end the Vietnam War, nor did it rupture the Soviet relationship with North Vietnam. 

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The U.S. nuclear establishment began a more formal exploration of how to make strategic use of its weapons after Nixon left office. President Carter endorsed several studies and a change in nuclear doctrine that implicitly recognized the possibility that nuclear weapons might actually be useful in certain situations short of a full-scale conflict with the Soviet Union. America was moving toward a posture that would give the president more flexibility.

President Reagan inherited Carter’s policy, but he brought to office a seemingly naive belief that the nuclear establishment was wrong — that nuclear weapons could never be used because they were uniquely horrific. If one side used one, the other side would retaliate; everyone would get lost in the spasm of Armageddon. At first, Reagan had no idea how to manage the tensions among his policy aim of ending the Cold War, his personal preference for direct diplomacy, and his religious conviction that nuclear war had to be avoided at all costs. 

Reagan’s words often sent mixed messages. The Soviets were an “evil empire,” he said in March 1983. Later that month, he confused everyone with his proposal for a Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan thought it was the antidote to mutually assured destruction, a way to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." But many of his advisers instead wanted it to be a trump card to establish offensive superiority over the Soviets. At times, the U.S. military seemed to be eager to poke the Soviet bear. Aggressive Navy exercises triggered numerous alerts across the Soviet Union and might have been one reason why Soviet defense forces shot down a Korean airliner that September.

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Just two months later, NATO was conducting a nuclear release procedure drill called Able Archer. Col. Gen. Ivan Yesin, commander of a Soviet nuclear missile force, was hiding with his men in a makeshift camouflage command center somewhere in the thick forests outside Moscow. His regiment was on alert. Across the country, leave had been canceled for students at military universities. Intelligence services, aided by a paranoid Politburo and anxious senior generals, had indications that NATO might use this exercise to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Warsaw Pact. Or maybe the U.S. would use its new electronic warfare technology to fry command links between the Soviets and their allies, and from there, decapitate the political leadership of the U.S.S.R. 

Yesin’s units, columns of heavy tractors bearing SS-20 Pioneer missiles capable of reaching Europe’s capitals, had been ordered to their wartime positions the day before. Yesin wanted to be with his men. If the order came, he would have launched the nukes without hesitation.

By the time the Russian alert during Able Archer ended, unusual activity across Europe had been detected by various NATO intelligence services, although its significance was missed. Months later, Reagan would learn about it. The CIA debated at the time whether “war scare” fears were real, but Reagan took them seriously. He redoubled his efforts at diplomacy. He modulated his rhetoric and expanded his empathy for Soviet fears. A few years later, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, he presided over the destruction of more nuclear weapons than anyone else on earth, including Yesin's SS-20s.

Presidents can, have and do use nuclear weapons as instruments of policy. Many of these examples have been hidden from the public because they break with our understanding of nuclear deterrence. So our presidential nominees must be forgiven for asking these questions. That said, Trump has given us every reason to believe he should never, ever be allowed to answer them for us.   

Marc Ambinder, a member ofUSA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is working on a book aboutAble Archer and other nuclear brinksmanship in the Cold War. Follow him on Twitter: @marcambinder

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