Anyone can get distracted now and then, and say things out loud he or she probably shouldn’t say. Perhaps an excited friend lets on about a surprise party, or a co-worker dishes up some unseemly office gossip. Or, if you’re the president of the United States, you might reveal some numbers about an adversary’s nuclear arsenal and then admit that those weapons, even a relatively small number of them, are pretty darn useful.
Donald Trump made this impromptu foray into nuclear-deterrence issues yesterday when he was inspecting the destruction he’s inflicted on the White House East Wing. A reporter asked whether he was again exchanging letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a reference to the president’s earlier epistolary bromance with Pyongyang’s dictator. “I can’t tell you that,” Trump responded. “But I get along with him. And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.”
It’s not always a “good thing” to “get along with” a murderous autocrat who runs a country that is functionally a prison camp, especially one with a nuclear arsenal. The size of that arsenal is a tightly held secret in Pyongyang, but it is not inconsequential: Experts working from open sources have made various guesses, usually in the range of roughly 60 thermonuclear weapons.
[Tom Nichols: Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation]
Trump, however, blurted out an exact tally. “He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” the president said. That’s a pretty specific number; the intelligence community almost never issues such precise figures, instead offering ranges of plausible guesses. Trump may be making it up out of nowhere, or perhaps talking about some subset of Pyongyang’s arsenal, as the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis suggested, or he’s garbling something he saw in a classified setting and didn’t understand. In the end, Lewis mused in a series of posts on social media, “Trump is trying to tell us a secret he heard, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it means.”
Clearly, Trump has been getting briefed on developments about the North Korean nuclear inventory. And yet, he seems strangely unconcerned. The stockpile might be small, but it is in the hands of a dangerous regime. Even at its current estimated size, the Hermit Kingdom’s arsenal can kill tens of millions of people in Asia; soon enough, the North Koreans may be able to reach the United States with nuclear-armed long-range missiles.
The president, however, seemed more concerned with blaming other chief executives for the situation, and he assured everyone that all was well.
Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got ’em. I get along with him very well. I can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon. And I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he’s gonna be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he’s going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he’s probably not gonna be so fine.
“Smart” and “dumb” need a bit of unpacking here, of course. When Trump says “smart,” he means me, and when he says “dumb” he means not me. What he seems to be implying is that although North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is very dangerous, he has no intention of messing with either the bombs or the regime and that future presidents would be fools to do otherwise.
Trump never says how he would have stopped North Korea’s nuclear program, and despite his current equanimity about North Korea’s nukes, he has emphasized that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, because … well, his reasoning on this double standard isn’t clear. Is it because the North Koreans—fighting alongside Russia in the middle of Europe, sharing missile technology with U.S. enemies, and running giant crypto scams—are somehow less dangerous a regime than Iran? Or perhaps he thinks the Iranian ayatollahs aren’t as reasonable as the North Korean leader—a man whose regime routinely threatens to turn Western cities into a “sea of fire”? Or—more likely—Trump feels he can live with Kim’s nuclear ambitions because the two of them took nice walks during a meeting that sated Trump’s ego with lots of saluting and pageantry.
Whatever Trump’s feelings, his bumbled comments (and needless fumbling of likely classified information) nonetheless revealed how much Trump regards nuclear weapons as a sign of status, and sent a message of crystalline clarity to Iran: Nuclear deterrence, even with only a few bombs, works. Get a nuclear weapon as soon as you can if you want to be safe and treated with the kind of deference America shows to North Korea.
[Tom Nichols: Russia and America are rediscovering the limits of nuclear weapons]
Iran and North Korea are practically allies, and in all likelihood, the North Koreans have probably already said something like this to their friends in Tehran. Recall that when NATO began its 2011 intervention in Libya, officials in Pyongyang said that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi should have held on to his nuclear program, instead of bargaining it away in exchange for Western promises. Months later, Qaddafi was dragged into the street and torn to pieces by his own people. The North Koreans, according to one scholar, probably felt “alarmed, but also deeply satisfied with themselves” as they watched countries such as Iraq and Libya suffer a fate that the DPRK averted by having a nuclear shield.
And now the sitting president of the United States has affirmed North Korea’s strategic wisdom: Trump has shown the world that even a tiny nuclear arsenal deters America from taking military action, and in Trump’s case, enemies who acquire nuclear weapons will also receive fawning letters and precious visits from the most powerful man on the planet. Forgo those weapons, as the Iranians have done until now, and the result is destruction, attempts at regime change, and demands for unconditional surrender.
Build a nuclear bomb, and you’ll face sanctions and other hardships—but you won’t get stealth bombers pulverizing your country. Your regime will survive, and after everyone gets used to the idea of another nuclear-armed power in the world, you’ll get entreaties and offers for talks.
And if America has a “smart” president, you might even get a love letter or two.
The post Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon appeared first on The Atlantic.
