Trump, Reagan & nukes

Ralph R. Reiland

On Dec. 22, Donald Trump tweeted at 10:50 a.m., when throngs were heading to malls: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

Several hours earlier, Vladimir Putin said he planned to “strengthen the strategic nuclear forces” of Russia.

The morning after his tweet calling for the U.S. to increase its 4,500 nuclear warheads, Trump expanded on his statement with “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” 

NBC News reported that Trump's tweet upended “decades of consensus that fewer nukes is better.”

Explained James Acton, co­-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, quoting Winston Churchill, “At a certain point, you are just making the rubble bounce higher.”

Ronald Reagan's policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, communism and nukes differed in many ways from prior policy and many prominent American intellectuals' views.

In May 1981, Reagan spoke to Notre Dame University students about Soviet communism's intrinsic weakness and unsustainability: “The West will not contain communism; it will transcend communism. We will not bother to denounce it; we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

The following year, in June, Reagan told the British Parliament that Marxism-Leninism would be left on the “ash heap of history,” asserting that there already was a great crisis in the Soviet Union, a systemic collapse that would bring “repeated explosions against repression” there and in Eastern Europe.

“What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base,” Reagan maintained. A rigid political/economic orthodoxy that combined top-down collectivism with totalitarian controls and food lines simply couldn't deliver the goods.

Early in his presidency, Reagan and several key insiders mapped out a strategy to attack the Soviet system's fundamental vulnerabilities.

“We adopted a comprehensive strategy that included economic warfare,” explained Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's Defense secretary from 1981-87.

The program reduced Soviet hard-currency earnings by driving down oil's price, lowered Soviet natural gas production and exports to the West, and cut Soviet access to Western high technology while a widespread technological disinformation operation blasted sand into the Soviet economy's gears.

While lowering Soviet income, the Reagan administration raised the Kremlin's expenses by providing covert support to Poland's Solidarity movement and the Afghan resistance and by introducing an aggressive high-tech defense buildup, including the much-maligned Strategic Defense Initiative.

The bottom line: Soviet income plummeted while costs escalated and one of history's most ominous empires was brought down almost exclusively by peaceful means