Trump's Offer to Reduce Nuclear Forces: Betrayal or Brilliant?

by Rod D. Martin
January 16, 2017

Every time Donald Trump says anything about defense, I get a thousand emails telling me he's either a warmonger who wants to nuke the world or bought-and-paid-for by the Russians and selling us into slavery.

This weekend was no different. Trump announced a willingness to bargain away America's sanctions on Russia in exchange for deep reductions in nuclear forces. And lots of my friends immediately wigged out.

The immediate accusation was that Trump had flip-flopped, promising a huge nuclear buildup and now going the other direction "to help Putin." But I actually don’t remember Trump saying he wanted to expand U.S. nuclear forces before the kerfuffle in December (maybe he did, but I don’t remember it). Nuclear forces, being largely unusable, don’t help us a lot beyond a certain point.

I personally wouldn’t mind having 8,000 of every kind of nuke, but they’re a cheap and easy chip to bargain away, so long as you don't go too far (as Obama, the Nuclear Freez…