President Donald Trump on Friday told Russia he was ordering two U.S. nuclear submarines to change course in response to comments made on social media by Russia’s former president. It was a rare public escalation between the two nuclear superpowers and an unusual moment of brinksmanship in the atomic age played out in public and online.
It was not immediately clear if any U.S. submarines changed their course. The Pentagon referred a request for more information to the White House, which did not immediately respond.
Trump wrote the comments in response to former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev’s online posts invoking reports about a Cold War-era Soviet nuclear strategy known as “The Dead Hand” designed to deploy nuclear weapons even if the humans assigned to operate the weapons had been killed in a first strike. The Russian government has not officially confirmed the capability, but in 2011, a retired commander of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces claimed it could be reactivated if needed.
Writing on his social media website Truth Social, Trump called Medvedev’s statements “highly provocative” and said he said he took action as a precaution. “I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump wrote. “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”
Trump was responding to an online post Medvedev wrote on Thursday that President Trump should remember movies about zombies and hinted at how “dangerous” a Russian nuclear retaliation could be. “Let him remember his favorite movies about ‘The Walking Dead,’ as well as how dangerous the non-existent in nature ‘Dead Hand’ can be,” Medvedev wrote.
The online spat between Trump and Medvedev, who often serves as the Kremlin’s Twitter troll, had played out earlier in the day. After Medvedev had rejected Trump’s shorter deadline for Russia to agree to a peace deal in Ukraine, Trump criticized him on Truth Social. Trump told Medvedev to “watch his words,” called him a “failed former President of Russia,” and said he was “entering very dangerous territory.”
It’s not the first time Trump has used social media to send a signal about the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In December 2016, after he was elected President the first time, Trump wrote on Twitter that the U.S. “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.” The comments at the time raised concerns that Trump would spark a new arms race by increasing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, which had been reduced through arms control agreements with Russia after the end of the Cold War. Trump has proposed increasing spending on nuclear forces, but the total number of U.S. warheads has declined since hitting a peak in the late 1960s and has largely remained the same in recent years.
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