Recent remarks by US President Donald Trump raise the prospect of his administration lowering its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, says Hu Gaochen, a doctoral student in international relations at Tsinghua University, writing for
The Paper.
The US may justify the use of nuclear weapons by starting with relatively less powerful ones to avoid mass civilian casualties, Hu said. The increasingly convincing capability of North Korean nuclear missiles to hit the US mainland has led some to worry Trump will order pre-emptive nuclear action, the scholar said.
Trump’s apparently positive attitude towards nuclear weapons may lead other nuclear states to engage in arms proliferation, he said, adding that a US-launched nuclear attack could destabilize the international nuclear situation.
Although some voices in the US have pledged to restrict the president’s use of nuclear weapons, Hu said they are not expected to succeed. Nuclear weapons have been treated by every single US government as the cornerstone of national security, according to the scholar. Donald Trump has unrestricted power over their deployment, and the US Army is only authorized to offer suggestions, he said.
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