End Times
You Should Be Scared of Nuclear War Again
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from a Cold War-era nuclear missile treaty will put us all in renewed danger
Mutually Assured Destruction has a bad name. I mean that literally — all three of those words are terrifying. Put them together, and they mean that annihilation is kept at bay by the fact that the two main nuclear powers — the United States and Russia — have thousands of warheads on land, sea, and in the air, targeted at each other and ready to launch, should one of them decide to fire first.
But what’s scarier than Mutually Assured Destruction in a world where an estimated nine countries have nuclear weapons and others want to join the club? Pretty much nothing.
That’s why the Trump Administration’s formal withdrawal of the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Friday is so worrying. The pact, which was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, eliminated stocks of ground-based ballistic missiles capable of traveling between 500 and 5,500 km, otherwise known as tactical arms. The existence of these weapons was inherently destabilizing.
