Tom Z. Collina is policy director at Ploughshares Fund. With William J. Perry he is co-writing a book on nuclear policy, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump, to be released next summer.

Next week, Democrats in Congress will have a golden opportunity to take a strong and principled stand against President Trump’s dangerous moves to resurrect the nuclear arms race.

So far, Trump has set a treacherous course for U.S. nuclear policy. He is tearing down arms control treaties that were carefully constructed over decades with bipartisan support. He is building new weapons at tremendous cost that will increase nuclear threats to the world. He has impulsively threatened nations (North Korea) with nuclear attack and has pushed others (Iran) to resume nuclear activities that they had ended.


Trump has been in office for less than three years, and the world is already a more dangerous place. Far from earning our trust on nuclear policy, he has given us reason to be deeply concerned.

Unfortunately, the executive branch has sweeping authority when it comes to nuclear weapons. Presidents can simply walk away from international agreements, as Trump has done with the Iran deal and the INF Treaty with Russia, and may do again with the New START treaty—the last remaining agreement that limits U.S. and Russian arsenals. Trump also has absolute authority to order the first use of nuclear weapons with no checks or balances from anyone: not his advisors, and not the Congress.

But the legislative branch can do one, very important thing—it can block funding. Congress holds the purse strings for the new weapons Trump wants.

The president is seeking to rebuild and maintain the entire arsenal as if the Cold War never ended (to the tune of almost $2 trillion) but only one of these new weapons can be delivered for use in the next year—a so-called “low-yield” warhead for Trident submarines, the W76-2. This weapon, about half the size of the Hiroshima bomb, is unneeded; worse, it has uniquely destabilizing features that make the use of nuclear weapons more likely.

In July, the House of Representatives, led by Armed Services chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), wisely voted to cancel roughly $20 million for this bomb in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. The House GOP voted en bloc against the NDAA, in part because it did not include this new nuclear weapon, and it passed with only Democratic votes.

Senate Democrats also have set their sights on stopping this bomb. Just last month, 18 senators, including party leaders and five presidential candidates (Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, Sanders and Warren) wrote a letter in support of killing the new weapon, arguing that it would “reduce the threshold for nuclear use and make nuclear escalation more likely.” We agree.

Administration officials allege that Moscow believes that an American president would not respond to Russian use of lower-yield nuclear weapons since his only options include high-yield ones. Since our president would not want to start an all-out nuclear war, he would be “self-deterred” from using big nukes, the logic goes, and Moscow would have a path to using small nukes that we could not block.

But it would be the height of folly to believe that the U.S. or Russia could use “low-yield” nuclear weapons and avoid a devastating nuclear war. “A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon,” said George Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s top diplomat. “You use a small one, then you go to a bigger one. I think nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons and we need to draw the line there.” Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used at any time is a strategic game changer.”

Congress can stop this dangerous bomb, but only if Democrats hold the line. As they did in the House, Republican leaders may threaten to bring down the entire defense bill over this issue. They fear that if Democrats can stop this reckless weapon, they can stop the next one too.

The most effective way for Congress to signal its disapproval of the administration’s dangerous nuclear policy is to stop this bomb in its tracks. If the Democrats fail to kill this dangerous weapon now, it will enter the arsenal before the 2020 election. This is ground zero on Trump’s nuclear agenda; this is where we make our stand.

