By Tom H. Hastings
In 1978 in Guyana some 918 people—one-third of them children—were poisoned or shot dead in a religious sect community, Jonestown. Until 9.11.2001 it was the largest mass murder of civilians in US history.
Of course, both those terrible events would pale alongside the civilian death count of any nuclear war, which could even end human life on Earth if waged full scale. Lucky thing we have treaties making that impossible, right?
Obviously not. Every nuclear treaty helped inch us away from that apocalyptic potential, but the mere existence of nuclear bombs threatens mass death. And every treaty that ends is a direct step toward waging nuclear war.
Treaty history and the Trump Effect
The first actual nuclear treaty was the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, between the Soviet Union (SU) and the US. It ended open-air bomb testing. There were many more testing treaties, some signed and ratified, some not. Trump posted on his social media that he was ordering the War Department to resume nuclear testing “immediately.”
The so-called treaties that ensued were generally called the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks—SALT, begun in 1969 and featured two bilateral treaties by 1972. Nuclear critics labeled them “production schedules” because they only capped numbers of missiles and warheads of the US and SU, never reducing them.
Finally, after eight years of citizen uprisings in Europe and North America beginning in 1979 (Nuclear Freeze, Plowshares, Euromissile crisis) Reagan and Gorbachev signed the first actual nuclear disarmament treaty in December 1987, the bilateral agreement to end some Intermediate Nuclear Forces weaponry—generally regarded as the most destabilizing class of nukes. It was a landmark treaty, it worked perfectly, and yet Trump cancelled it in his first term in 2018, a huge blow to the nuclear disarmament movement.
Continuing in that vein, the bilateral Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties (START I and START II) reduced numbers of warheads and delivery vehicles (missiles, bombers) and so of course Trump simply let that expire this year.
Another landmark treaty that Trump ended was the Open Skies Treaty, again with US and Russia.
Of course the Iran treaty is top of mind generally at this time, since Trump launched war on Iran with one stated goal to achieve a guarantee that Iran would never get a nuclear weapon. The saddest part of all this is that the nuclear deal achieved in 2015 solely with negotiation and sanction under Obama is significantly better than what Trump gets now, at a cost of $113 billion, 16 dead American troops, 400+ wounded, and at least 3468 Iranians, often civilians, including schoolgirls.
Indeed, there were no schoolgirls killed by the Obama deal, and the Strait of Hormuz was always open—until Trump’s decidedly maladaptive attacks.
The sum total of Trump’s erosion of nuclear safeguards belie his rhetoric about nuclear safety; he has done more to make Americans and the world less safe from nuclear annihilation than any US leader ever.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.
