Trump’s new nuclear policy increases chances of nuclear war: Analyst
US President Donald Trump's plan to adopt a hawkish position on the use of nuclear weapons is a dangerous policy that increases chances of nuclear conflict, says a former foreign policy analyst for Congress.
The Trump administration’s new policy of constructing more “usable” low-yield nuclear weapons increases chances of nuclear war, James Jatras told Press TV in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Jatras said it seems Trump is not making the decisions himself, but has been “misled” by “professional” military leaders to make such decisions.
He warned that such new measures escalate an arms race between the US and other major world powers, namely Russia and China, who as a result, will develop their own weapons to counter the new US arsenal.
“It is very very worrisome that we are going past the point of the kind of hair trigger we saw during the first Cold War with the Soviet Union and what is amazing is that back then people were worried about it, there was real anxiety about the potential for nuclear war and there were voices that spoke against it, today you almost hear nothing.”
On Tuesday the Guardian reported that Jon Wolfsthal, special assistant to former President Barack Obama on arms control and nonproliferation, had said the Trump administration is seeking to loosen constraints on the use of nuclear weapons and develop a new low-yield nuclear warhead for US Trident missiles.
Wolfsthal, who saw the draft of the plans, said the US wants to use a modified version of the Trident D5 submarine-launched missiles with only part of its normal warhead.
The plans had been prepared by the Pentagon by order of the White House.
“What I've been told by the people who wrote the thing was what they were trying to do was to send a clear deterrent message to Russians, the North Korean and the Chinese,” Wolfsthal told The Guardian.
Security experts have expressed concern about the policy, saying that constructing more “usable” nuclear weapons will increase the possibility of a nuclear war.
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