Tom Nichols on the arms control process, in the second Trump era – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Follow our Iran coverage
By Dan Drollette Jr | May 13, 2026
By Dan Drollette Jr | May 13, 2026
Tom Nichols has an impressive resume: a professor emeritus of national-security affairs and strategy at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he taught for more than two decades. A staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes on everything from nuclear weapons, the challenges to democracy, Russia, and foreign affairs to popular culture. An instructor at the Harvard Extension School. Former legislative aide at the US Senate under Sen. John Heinz (R-Penn.), and at the Massachusetts State House—where, as a member of what he calls the “old New England moderate Republican tradition,” he worked under a Democrat. Author of several books, including The Death of Expertise and the more recent Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy. Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Most impressive of all, as Nichols likes to point out on his Wikipedia page, is that he is a five-time, undefeated Jeopardy champion.
He is also the proud son of Chicopee, Mass., growing up in this mill-town in the days before the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, when the river close to the family home glowed in Technicolor hues from the waste of the factories upstream. Cleaning up that river showed what America can do when it sets its mind to it, he says.
Nichols is also an avid observer of US domestic politics, the rise of Donald Trump, and their impact on America’s conduct of international relations. He writes about it all, he says, from the perspective of someone who is “old-school about the Constitution.”
In this March 13, 2026 interview with the Bulletin‘s Dan Drollette Jr, Nichols delves into the tumultuous current political situation in the United States and its impact on US foreign policy, and what it means for the prospects for new nuclear arms control agreements. He gives his opinion on these and many other topics, and whether the world can return to what he terms the “golden age of arms control” when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were at the helm.
(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)
Dan Drollette Jr.: In October last year, you appeared on the MS Now “Deadline: White House”[1] cable news channel to discuss President Trump’s military strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. And you essentially said that these were extrajudicial acts committed abroad, and that they fit in with his behavior domestically. In the clip, you stated “[T]he American president has said: ‘I can point the US military any place I want and kill anyone I want.’… He is acclimating people to the notion that the military is his private army, unconstrained by law, unconstrained by norms, unconstrained by American traditions.”
Tom Nichols: Right, I stand by that.
Trump’s behavior at home and abroad reflects his personality. In other words, his actions, domestic or foreign, reflect his narcissistic insistence on always being right—and viewing everyone else as being sort of supporting bit players in the drama around him.
This can be seen in his not consulting with allies, and not notifying anyone in advance that we’re going to war. The idea that our allies have independent governments, with their own interests, is something he’s unable to parse.
I think the idea that everybody has their own interests sort of baffles Trump, because Trump lives in a world where everything is about him.
Drollette: A few months ago, [Kissinger Center director] Francis Gavin[2] said in a Bulletin interview that Trump has trouble distinguishing between US allies and enemies. Trump puts them all on the same plane: They’re all economic competitors.
Nichols: I’d put it more as Trump sees the world as divided into only two classes of people: One is people who do good things for Trump. The other group is everyone else.
Drollette: What does that mean for US relations? Will other countries trust the United States in the future to hold to its word, especially when it comes to nuclear arms control agreements?
Nichols: Not while Trump is president. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t really care about any of those processes.
Look, we just went to war against a major country with exactly one ally.
Even in the Second Gulf War—which was tremendously unpopular with a lot of people around the world—we had a four-nation coalition going in, and the declared support of more than 30 countries, along with the military forces of three.
But you know, the mess that Iraq turned into after that war seems like a well-thought-out, lawyered-up process compared to what we’ve just done.
Drollette: I’ve seen op-eds that say that on some level, Trump is behaving abroad like Putin.[3] Do you think that’s a legitimate comparison?
Nichols: No, I really wouldn’t say Trump’s behaving like Putin—but I do think Trump fell prey to the same assumptions that Putin did. Which are that his enemies are idiots, weak, illegitimate, and will collapse at the first whiff of grapeshot.
But unlike Putin, Trump doesn’t have the unlimited ability to pour men and forces into this conflict. That would be deeply unpopular, and we’re still a democracy.
However, much like Putin, Trump seems completely unable to comprehend that things could—and did—not go the way he planned.
Because Trump seems to want to will things into existence, much like a little boy. Trump thinks that if he believes in something strongly enough, it just happens.
In his mind, of course Iran’s going to collapse. Once we kill the Ayatollah, of course the whole regime falls.
In reality, maybe not.
And while adults have the ability to think through alternatives and be a little more resilient, Trump—in a very childlike way—just fixates on an idea and keeps saying: “It’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”
And again, like a small child, he is incapable of ever admitting a mistake.
Now, Putin doesn’t admit mistakes because he’s a dictator and admitting mistakes in a dictatorship can get you killed.
But Trump doesn’t admit mistakes because of this childlike behavior, and that extends from the most trivial to the most major things: This is a guy who re-drew the path of a hurricane on a national weather map with a Sharpie so that he wouldn’t be wrong.
There’s this narcissistic need to never admit a mistake—and now that’s true about the war. It may be too early to say how this war will eventually turn out, but it’s certainly going on longer and with more cost than he expected. But he just can’t bring himself to say that.
Drollette: That sounds a lot like an observation that [former National Security Council member] Fiona Hill once made. As you know, Hill worked under Trump—and prior to that, she co-wrote a book on Putin, whom she met in person. And she called Putin a “self-built man,” in the sense that Putin had no one help his rise to the top.
But Trump always had everything handed to him on a platter. And despite getting everything, Trump always wanted more: Hill called Trump “just one big bundle of will.” [4]
Nichols: Putin came up in a tough world, and he has a kind of gangster’s self-assurance—the kind of thing that comes from being a bully and trying to survive in a violent place. While Trump has lived a world where no one ever says “No” to him.
I think that this war is really the first time that something has gone wrong that he can’t control.
Drollette: You used the phrase “gangster’s self-assurance.” I’ve read critiques that say that Trump loves the idea of being tough like a gangster—the John Gotti kind of thing.[5] Commentators say that is what’s behind Trump’s choice of language, his management style, his demand for absolute loyalty, and his penchant for going after those who cross him.
Nichols: Yeah, he likes the notion of the Dapper Don, and talking tough. But, you know, this is a guy who doesn’t even fire people in person. He sends other people to do it or sends them Tweets.
It’s the worst combination: overbearing, rich, old guy and spoiled little kid in the same person.
Because he doesn’t think things through, and he doesn’t care about what a lot of people think.
Although I guess I should qualify that last remark: Trump does care about a few things. He cares about money, he cares about the markets, he cares about his reputation.
And when Trump encounters trouble in the form of things that could harm his reputation, he tries to let himself off the hook by trying to find a way to back off without calling it that. That’s what he did with the universities, with tariffs, with ICE, and any number of things: He hedges, waffles, changes the numbers, moves the goalposts, changes the rules, and redraws the map.
But this business with Iran is dragging on, and Trump doesn’t know how to get out of it, though he’s trying.
Drollette: Can you give an example?
Nichols: If you look over time, you’ll notice that Trump started off the opening night of the war with a giant plate of rationales for starting it. And then that got trimmed down to four or five things, and then trimmed down to three things. And this morning it was one thing: “We did it all to destroy Iran’s missile stocks.”
To me, that’s a man looking for a way out, so that he can declare there was only one objective—and it was achieved, supposedly.
But that’s far from all the stuff at the beginning: ending terrorism, peace in the Middle East, regime change, and dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons’ capabilities. All that got whittled down to just one, cherry-picked item. And I suspect it was so that he can claim: “I have a metric, and I did it.”
It reminds me of Calvinball.
Drollette: Calvinball? You mean like in the old “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip—where there’s a kid’s game where they just make things up as they go along?
Nichols: Yes, that’s it.
But the Republican Party, which is in lock-step with Trump, plays Calvinball too. By doing so, it acts as his enablers.
And I’m saying that as a former registered Republican.
It goes back to what Fiona Hill was talking about—people just never saying “No” to Trump.
This war marks the first time where Trump can’t just tell someone: “All right, that didn’t work out. Turn it off. Go fix it.”
That’s not how wars work.
Drollette: That goes to my next question. You wrote a piece in The Atlantic in early February, called “Countdown to An Arms Race.”[6] It noted that back in July 2025, Trump was saying “If New START was to expire, well, that’s not an agreement you want expiring.” And then in January 2026, six months later, Trump was saying, “If it expires, it expires.”
Nichols: He doesn’t care. Something like New START [New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] only matters to him insofar as it does something for him—or to him.
Drollette: Does the expiration of New START help him or hurt him?
Nichols: For a while, Trump thought he was going to be the master of arms control. He was going to be the great liberator: get a peace prize, get rid of nuclear weapons, all that.
But now he doesn’t care, because he doesn’t see anything in it for him. Remember, he has a very small attention span, governed primarily by what’s good for him or what’s not good for him.
Drollette: What does that mean for the rest of us?
Nichols: Nothing good.
You want a president who thinks of himself last and the nation first. But this is completely reversed. Everything starts with what’s good for Donald Trump, and then comes the national interest. Sometimes the nation might benefit from it, sometimes it might be damaged by it, but he doesn’t really care either way.
Drollette: Do you think there’s a tendency for people in the United States to underestimate the good that nuclear arms control agreements have done for us? That they tend to see treaties like they’re giveaways to the other side?
Nichols: Absolutely yes. First of all, the average American pays no attention to foreign policy until it’s right in their face. I mean, look at this war: The public still hasn’t really come to grips with the fact that we’re at war with a country of 90 million people.
The American public is just thinking: “The Wi Fi is on, and there’s good stuff on TV.” If they’re not affected by it—and if they don’t personally know anybody in the military—then they just go on with their lives. They don’t think about things like nuclear arms control treaties, or international agreements, or alliances.
And that’s not Donald Trump’s fault. That’s just the way the American public’s been.
Drollette: Was it always like this?
Nichols: The last time I can remember the American public really being clued-in to nuclear arms control was in the mid-1980s, when it felt like we were an inch away from going into a nuclear conflict with the Soviets.
That anxiety made its way into the White House, probably because the Cold War was entering a really dangerous phase, with the Soviet Union starting to come apart. The USSR was governed at the time by geriatric, very dangerous people like Yuri Andropov, and their empire was barely holding together. And this was at a time when there was finally an American administration that was determined to go on an arms buildup.
Although I actually have to give credit to Jimmy Carter too, because the very beginnings of this did actually start under Carter.
But in any case, by 1982, the world seemed a more dangerous place. The Soviets had had a great run but suddenly the Americans were back, and the Americans were building nuclear weapons systems and investing in NATO.
So people were scared, and rightly so.
Even Ronald Reagan was scared.
But nobody’s scared now, because they just don’t think about it. They feel that nuclear weapons were something we solved decades ago; there’s nobody in elected politics making a big deal about it, and nothing in the pop culture.
Drollette: Nothing?
Nichols: To give you an idea, for years, I taught a course on pop culture during the Cold War, where I pointed out to today’s kids that you couldn’t watch TV for an hour back then without seeing images of nuclear bombs or Ronald Reagan—scary stuff. Even MTV was very political in the ‘80s.
Today, the only remaining nuclear arms treaty is gone, and it seems like nobody even knew it existed. It’s like it never happened.
Drollette: But I remember Reagan as pretty hawkish on the campaign trail and in the early years of office. What do you think made Reagan transform?
Nichols: I think what really bothered him was seeing the 1983 movie The Day After.[7]
Although even before that, Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist at heart. When Reagan came in to office, he actually said “We should get rid of all nuclear weapons” though nobody took him for real. It turned out that Reagan was genuine about that—though it wasn’t until he met [Soviet Union President Mikhail] Gorbachev, who also believed in de-escalation, that the two sides actually began to get somewhere.
And some of that anti-nuclear weapons thought percolated throughout his administration.
There’s even a little-known anecdote to the effect that before [former special presidential adviser and chief arms negotiator] Paul Nitze died, he told his friends that he’d advised Reagan to never use nuclear weapons, not even in retaliation. Which is quite extraordinary.
Drollette: But the Reagan that America saw in those first years was so very combative.
Nichols: I think Reagan was reflecting a lot of what many Americans thought—that the Soviet Union had gotten away with murder for too long. And they wanted him to kind of slap them upside the head and say that the USA is not taking that anymore.
Carter tried to do that, but Carter never understood that his interest in morally stripping the bark off the Soviets was not compatible with sitting down and talking with them about arms control. You could do one or the other, but not both.
After [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski becomes Carter’s main muse on the Soviet Union, the Soviets actually thought Carter was tougher than Reagan. A few decades ago, one of the former Soviet ambassadors to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, wrote in his memoirs that the Soviet leadership thought that Reagan was going to be just another Nixon—tough-talking on the outside, but a guy willing to go along with the status quo.
Of course, they were in for a terrible surprise.
So far as Reagan’s motivations go, there came a moment when he realized that the nuclear race between the US and the USSR just could not go on—even without the influence of The Day After. There have been some good books on this, but the gist is that at one point, Reagan said “I’ve got to convince the Soviets that I’m not out to get them; I’m not out to destroy them.”
Reagan even writes in his diary that he thinks that these briefings on nuclear war plans are just bonkers. He just thinks they’re crazy. He’s like, “How can people believe we can do this?”
But in the good old-style Republican fashion of those days, his attitude was: “Those are things I believe privately. In public, I’m going to punch them in the face.”
Finally, after a few years of this, especially after the 1984 election, Reagan decided to reach out to Russia. After some twists and turns, he met Gorbachev—who was the fourth Soviet leader Reagan dealt with in three or four years.
At that point, I think they were both shocked to discover that they actually wanted a lot of the same things. And they managed to conclude what I think is a treaty that made the world so much safer.
The fact is that Reagan ushered in a kind of golden age of arms control that nobody expected from him. I say that because the INF treaty [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] that they signed opened the door to START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty], and then New START, and all the other stuff.
But Reagan could do it because in those days, everybody—conservative or liberal—understood that nuclear war was a horrible threat, even if conservatives and liberals dealt with the threat differently.
Conservatives dealt with it by pretending not to be afraid, and trying to enhance deterrence by exhibiting commitment and will. Liberals dealt with the prospect of nuclear war by offering deals and trying to negotiate and engage—because liberals are very process-oriented. And both of those approaches had their merits.
But where we stand now is we don’t have any process. We don’t have anybody thinking about it, because people like to think the nuclear problem is over and done with. They think it doesn’t exist.
I say that from my own experiences in teaching courses at the Harvard Extension School on nuclear weapons; I would take my students through what an attack on Boston would look like, and after class they would just walk out, basically shaking their heads. And I remember afterwards a young person saying: “So Professor Nichols, I understand nuclear weapons are bad. But I don’t get it. What were you all so afraid of?”
And I told him to go watch some movies on the horrors of nuclear war, and I rattled off some movie titles, including a 1980s British film called Threads—which is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Not to mention the documentaries about nuclear weapons.
Drollette: Why do you think that the dangers of nuclear weaponry fell off the public radar?
Nichols: Two things, really. One is that I think we’ve had it too good for too long. As I wrote in my last book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy,[8] we just assume problems will be taken care of.
I mean, when I was a kid in the ‘70s, the roads were disgusting. There was trash everywhere; and I remember how dirty the American landscape was.
There was a lot of smog coming out of those tailpipes, and the rivers were a mess.
I grew up right on the Connecticut River, five minutes up the street from the Willimansett Bridge in Chicopee, Massachusetts, along the river’s shoreline, and it used to smell. The water surface was in Technicolor from the refuse from the paper mills, which would dump all their oils and dyes and photochemicals into the river.
Nobody wanted to put up with that anymore, and the arguments were not about whether or not the rivers should be cleaned but over how much government action there should be, and how much it should cost to fix it. And don’t forget, it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
Can you imagine that happening now? Today’s Republican Party would leave the river dirty just to “own the libs.”
Which brings me to my second point: We forget that there was a time when being a Republican or a Democrat simply reflected your different approaches to governing and your different policy preferences. They didn’t represent two entire, diametrically opposed worldviews. Back then, nobody wanted America to be a trash heap, so we got together and cleaned things up.
That doesn’t happen now, because the two parties—Republicans especially—don’t really talk about problems; they talk about winning. And Republicans feel themselves to be this angry minority.
But back then—I turned 18 in 1978—people could really work across the aisle. Especially in state-level politics, where I was a young Republican working for a Democrat in the Massachusetts State House. And some of my boss’s best friends were Republicans—including Andy Card, who went on to become [George W.] Bush’s Chief of Staff.
That happened because rivers and hills and sewer systems don’t observe political boundaries.
Similarly, you gotta talk across party lines when you’re trying to get funding for the MTA [the local transit system in Boston]. To do that, you’ve got to do a horse trade with the folks who are lobbying for the bus system at the other end of the state, in Chicopee.
That kind of back-and-forth is the essence of democracy.
However, the two sides don’t talk to each other now, and things have gone topsy-turvy. We are in the middle of a war that has had no authorization from Congress, no hearings, no AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act], no invocation of war powers. Instead, the president has gone ahead and done this like a medieval prince, completely outside the American constitution.
I guess I’m just old-school about the Constitution.
Drollette: Given the situation, what does all that mean for nuclear arms control treaties?
Nichols: With Trump in place? It’s flat-out not gonna happen.
First of all, we don’t have the talent or the expertise. I mean, look at what a hash that [Trump son-in-law and Middle East envoy Jared] Kushner made of dealmaking with Iran.[9]
And just as important, there’s no interest in treaties among his supporters. This particular strain of Republicanism thinks that agreements show weakness and unilateralism shows strength.
Now, I think that’s dumb and historically illiterate, but I also think it shows a deep insecurity.
Secure and powerful countries negotiate; insecure countries hunker down and squawk about their right to do anything they want.
It’s kind of weird, but this keeps coming back to the personality of our commander-in-chief—which is that, ultimately, he’s very insecure. He constantly has to hear how wonderful he is and do things like put his name on the Kennedy Center. Consequently, all of the machinery that normally runs a superpower has been short-circuited because everything is now so dependent on the stray thoughts of one man at any given moment, due to this overly personalized system of power in the White House.
Now, fortunately, we’ve got a big, sprawling federal system, and Massachusetts can thank him for his input and choose not to do them. So can Rhode Island, and so can any other of the 50 states. But nonetheless, Trump is eroding those constitutional guardrails by personalizing power to a ridiculous level, such as putting his face on the Justice Department building.
Every American should think of that personalization of power as a mortal threat to their democracy.
Drollette: Will that change after the upcoming elections this November, assuming we have truly free and fair elections?
Nichols: I think we will have elections, though I also think Trump will try to monkey with them: He could try to put ICE or military forces in the streets, to name just two examples. But I think that he’s in for a lot of trouble, because the resistance to Trump has built up so much that the electorate is going to take this out on a lot of Republicans.
This is buttressed by one empirical indicator already, which is that all these special elections and off-year elections have just been a complete bloodbath for the Republicans. That doesn’t portend well going into the midterms.
What that means is that if the Democrats win the House, I feel his presidency is functionally over because he will be investigated and impeached. Legislation that he wants will not get passed.
Unfortunately, I think that what then happens is that Trump will go even more extreme, because this will be such a narcissistic injury to him that he will lose all sense of proportion, and then we will be in an even more dangerous time. Because Trump will try to do things by executive action; he will maybe try to use the military again overseas; and enter into more adventures abroad. Whatever it is, Trump will not take it well if the American people take power away from him, which is what will happen if he loses the House.
I think the Senate’s a much bigger lift for the opposition, but the House is gone—and Republicans are freaking out about that.[10] So, I predict the Senate is probably going to stay closely divided, and the Supreme Court will still be six-to-three in Trump’s favor.
The real danger here is that [Supreme Court Justice Samuel] Alito steps down and Trump puts in someone much younger who stays on that court forever. There’s an opportunity there for Trump to really solidify that kind of control over the Supreme Court. But again, obviously, if he loses the Senate, that’s not going to happen. Even with a very narrow margin in the Senate, things could change.
I think that if the Democrats win the House and we get through the midterms, then the dynamic in this country changes—but that requires Democrats to not act like Democrats and stand in a circular firing squad, which is what they usually do.
Drollette: Getting back to the bigger picture, what would these scenarios mean? Can anything be done to restore the post-World War II international order and nuclear arms control?
Nichols: You mean, once Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is gone?
Drollette: Yes.
Nichols: Some of Trump’s supporters—and some of his critics—think that Trump has completely destroyed the old rules-based international order forever.
Me, I’m more optimistic. I think that all the old infrastructure is still there.
You know, building an international order based on rules and law and institutions is more in our bones now, in the 21st century, than it was 100 years ago. I think that’s true everywhere—even in today’s Republican Party, where moderate Republicans are keeping their heads down. They would probably very much like to go back to that international order. We know that NATO, for example, is much more popular among Republicans than you would think just by looking at Trump and his sycophants. But for now, the moderates are just hiding, under a rock.
So, it could be that our alliance will come back, and nuclear arms control gets done, but first it’s really going to take sweeping the current lot out of Washington—including their enablers.
Drollette: By “enablers,” you’re talking about folks like the Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins, and that kind of …
Nichols: Susan Collins is the reason I quit the Republican Party, to be honest with you.
Drollette: Really?
Nichols: Oh, yeah, when Collins went to bat for Brett Kavanaugh, she made it clear that she was never going to stand up to Donald Trump—and that’s what convinced me that the moderate wing of the Republican Party was basically dead. I realized that I had nowhere to hang my hat in the party anymore, because I came out of the old New England moderate Republican tradition. I had even worked for Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania—a very moderate Republican, who was very much interested in arms control.
Drollette: So, by “New England moderate Republican tradition,” you mean people like the first Bush—George H. W. Bush, the one who called Kennebunkport home?
Nichols: Oh, absolutely, yeah. People keep kidding me about liking Reagan too much, but my choice in 1980 in the primaries was really for George H. W. Bush. So, when I was voting for the Reagan/Bush team in the election itself, I was really voting for the vice presidential candidate rather than the presidential candidate. Because in the primaries, I thought Bush was more qualified than Reagan, and he was. But Reagan was the better leader—at least for that particular time in history.
But later, when Bush got into office, Bush really came into his own… I think George H.W. Bush ought to be on Mount Rushmore. I think he was an amazing president, for his handling of the First Gulf War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, among many other things.
Bottom line: I think there are people hiding out in the Republican Party who support the rules-based international order and arms control. A lot of them have been forced out of office or have quit, but I still think that that international system of trade, cooperation, and security—led by the United States—is what most Americans want, regardless of party.
Heck, even JD Vance probably wants that, but he can’t say it out loud in front of his boss. He once said things in 2016 in the pages of The Atlantic—the magazine where I’m a columnist—that he’d like to repudiate now. In our pages, Vance wrote: “Trump is cultural heroin.”[11]
Yes, he wrote that sentence. Then Vance changed his mind and said he was on board.
Now, me, I had a different evolution, becoming an early convert to the Reagan nuclear abolition approach probably about the same time Reagan did—in the 1980s. Because I was working for a company that worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative,[12] where I was attending classified briefings about nuclear war scenarios. I remember looking around the room and hearing them talk about the United States taking 40 million casualties and accepting that as a “limited strike.”
And I thought they were nuts.
I mean, if there were 40 million casualties in the US, then we were gonna launch every effing thing we have in retaliation; we’d be going to melt the Earth. Who were they kidding? But these people would tell me that the US could show restraint and just launch a salvo that would hit the enemy’s infrastructure.
And that’s really when I started to become convinced that the United States had to seriously get into nuclear weapons treaties and bans. I felt that any rational person would think so.
You know, I always thought the test of an honest conservative was whether they would abandon the reliance on nuclear weapons once the Cold War was over.
Many of us did: George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and conservative Democrats like Bill Perry. Believe me, when [former US Secretary of State] George Shultz and Henry Kissinger are saying we can live in a world without nuclear weapons, that means something.
But I don’t see that happening today.
Let’s face it: With Trump, we’re talking about a guy who pulled out of the INF Treaty in 2018 and let the New START Treaty lapse in 2026. So the idea that somehow Trump’s going to suddenly turn around and say “We need more arms control treaties” is just not likely. Trump’s already celebrating about a new super-size battleship that he wants to build—to be called a “Trump-class” ship, of course—that his Secretary of the Navy says will have nuclear weapons on board. That doesn’t sound like an arms control agenda to me.
I think we won’t be able to stumble back to the old post-World War II, rules-based, international order until after this presidential term is over. That’s not going to come until 2029 at the earliest. And the same with any kind of nuclear arms control treaties. Absolutely. I think arms control as a process is just dead for now.
Endnotes
[1] The full October 24, 2025 episode can be heard on the MS-Now Deadline-White House website at https://deadline-white-house.simplecast.com/episodes/legally-incomprehensible.
[2] Francis Gavin is a historian, and director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The comments referred to here can be found at “ ‘He’s basically running a reality TV show’: Francis Gavin on Trump’s impact on the US, its allies, and the post-war world order” in the September 4, 2025 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-09/hes-basically-running-a-reality-tv-show-francis-gavin-on-trumps-impact-on-the-us-its-allies-and-the-post-war-world-order/.
[3] For example, see this December 23, 2025 opinion piece in The Guardian by Henry Farrell and Sergey Radchenko, “Trump and Putin share a craving for status. That’s why they both want to destroy Europe” at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/23/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-europe-russia-us.
[4] The comments of Russia expert, intelligence analyst, and former National Security Council member Hill can be found in the July 15, 2025 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article “Fiona Hill: What Putin (and Trump?) might do next, after Ukraine” at https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-07/fiona-hill-what-putin-and-trump-might-do-next-after-ukraine/ and at the April 13, 2016 Bulletin article “Putin: The one-man show the West doesn’t understand” at https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2016.1170361.
[5] This observation has been made by a number of observers, biographers, and former associates of President Donald Trump. For example, see the February 3, 2023 New York Times article by William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess, and Jonah E. Bromwich, titled “Trump Likened to Mob Boss John Gotti in Ex-Prosecutor’s New Book” at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/nyregion/trump-mark-pomerantz-book.html. More can be found in the August 23, 2018 article in Vanity Fair by Tina Nguyen, titled “ ‘I Know All About Flipping’: Trump Goes Full Gotti” at https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-flipping-ought-to-be-illegal.
[6] See Tom Nichol’s February 3, 2026 article in The Atlantic, “Countdown to an Arms Race,” at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trump-nuclear-weapons-treaty/685856/.
[7] This made-for-TV movie, produced by ABC television and shown with no commercial breaks, has been called one of the most effective public service announcements in history. Shortly after he saw the film, Reagan gave a speech saying that nuclear weapons should be “banished from the face of the Earth.” The film’s impact reverberates decades later; see the December 13, 2018 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists special report “Facing nuclear reality, 35 years after The Day After” by Dawn Stover at https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after.
[8] For a review of the 2021 book Our Own Worst Enemy, see Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332376-our-own-worst-enemy.
[9] More can be found at the March 24, 2026 article by Kylie Atwood for CNN, “Iran has expressed a preference for negotiating with Vance, sources say,” at https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/25/world/live-news/iran-war-us-israel-trump-03-25-26. In addition, see the February 26, 2026 article by Alexander Bolton in The Hill, “Tillis: Kushner, Witkoff leading peace talks ‘doesn’t make any sense’ ” at https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5756401-thom-tillis-criticizes-kushner-witkoff/.
[10] For more, see this April 1, 2026 article by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Russell Berman in The Atlantic, “Public Anger is Rising,” at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/congress-government-shutdown-tsa/686653/.
[11] See the July 4, 2016 article by J.D. Vance in The Atlantic, “Opioid of the Masses,” at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-masses/489911/, where Vance writes “What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission…. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein….”
“The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
[12] The Strategic Defense Initiative was a Reagan-era missile defense program that was supposed to use novel technologies such as space-based lasers, “brilliant pebbles,” and “smart rocks” to knock out incoming ICBMs before they could hit the United States. The press dubbed it “Star Wars,” and subsequent federal agencies concluded that space-based systems would be too complicated to be effective—as well as too expensive to afford. For more details, see https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/space-based-missile-defense-golden-dome-or-gold-brick
The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent nonprofit organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.
Keywords: Iran agreement, NATO, New START, Trump, nuclear arms control, post-World War II international order
Topics: Analysis, Interviews, Magazine, Missile Defense, Nuclear Weapons, Technology and Security, The Iranian problem
Dan Drollette Jr is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent … Read More
By Dmitry Stefanovich
By Dan Drollette Jr
By Olamide Samuel, Kudakwashe Mapako
By Dan Drollette Jr
By François Diaz-Maurin
By Andrew Facini
By Andrew Facini
By François Diaz-Maurin
By Dan Drollette Jr
By Jingjie He
By John Mecklin
By Dmitry Stefanovich
By Dan Drollette Jr
By Richard Aslin, Nigel Goldenfeld, Lynn Nadel
By François Diaz-Maurin
By John Birks
By Syed Ali Zia Jaffery
By Vivian La
By Oliver Milman
By Diya Ashtakala
Copyright © 2026 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. All rights reserved. Registered 501(c)(3). EIN: 36-2136497 Terms of UsePrivacy Policy
PO Box 15461, Chicago, IL 60615 | 773.834.3779