Can the US stop the brewing nuclear arms race before it erupts?
In 1946, the U.S. government proposed decommissioning all of its atomic bombs and putting the related technology under international control if other states would do the same. (The Soviets refused.) A few years later, President Dwight Eisenhower went to the United Nations to deliver his famous his 'Atoms for Peace' speech, imploring other countries not to go down the nuclear road.
To strengthen its case, the United States offered its Cold War allies a deal: it would use its arsenal to deter their shared enemies, so that other members of what was then called the Free World wouldn't need to build their own bombs. To sweeten the bargain, the U.S. offered to help friendly states develop civilian nuclear energy programs.
This arrangement was formalized in 1970 with the creation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Under that agreement, countries that already had nuclear weapons — the U.S., the USSR, the United Kingdom, France and China — got to keep them, but all other signatories pledged to give up their pursuit.
This U.S.-led system for preventing proliferation worked remarkably well. In the last six decades, only four additional countries (Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) have developed full-fledged nuclear weapons, although a few others (notably Iran) have come close. Even more importantly, in the 80 years since the U.S. attacks on Japan, no other country has used a nuclear weapon in war.
Yet that remarkable record could soon be broken and all progress lost.
With the U.S. pausing assistance to Ukraine, threatening to abandon NATO unless other members raise their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP (the current U.S. level is 3.5 percent), and walking back its pledges to protect other allies, countries around the world are suddenly scrambling to come up with alternatives. It may be only a matter of time before some of them decide to pursue the ultimate defense.
The signs of this shift are already appearing. Last week, French President Emanuel Macron — declaring, 'I want to believe that the United States will remain by our side, but we need to be ready if that were no longer the case' — offered to extend France's nuclear umbrella over its neighbors. While Macron's desire to dissuade other European states from going nuclear is laudable, he is unlikely to succeed.
For one thing, Paris has proposed this before, in 2020, and it didn't go anywhere. The other, more fundamental problem is that recent developments highlight the danger of relying on any another country, be it the U.S. or France, for one's own security.
That is, after all, exactly what Ukraine did in 1994. In exchange for security guarantees from Washington, London and Moscow, Kyiv gave up the nukes it had inherited from the Soviet Union. We all know how that turned out — following one invasion in 2014 and another in 2022, Russia now controls about 18 percent of Ukraine's territory, and Washington has just suspended military and intelligence support to Ukraine.
Imagine you're watching this from Japan or South Korea, which have aggressive, nuclear-armed neighbors and are themselves 'threshold nuclear powers' — meaning they lack the bomb but have the technology, know-how and material to assemble one quickly if they choose to. Or pretend you're another country with a less-advanced domestic nuclear program but the bad luck to live in a very dangerous neighborhood — Eastern Europe, say. Why wouldn't you decide that now is the time to quickly start building a bomb of your own?
Indeed, that's just what Poland's President Donald Tusk suggested doing in a speech to his parliament on Friday.
For most countries, the calculus is not be simple. Nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous and very unpopular. There's a powerful taboo against acquiring them, let alone contemplating their use. Getting caught developing them can trigger international pressure, sanctions and ostracization. Some countries, like Germany, have the capacity to quickly build a bomb but probably never will for historical reasons. And some scholars question whether nukes are even that effective at protecting the states that possess them.
It's true that in a few cases (Israel and Pakistan) nuclear weapons haven't discouraged enemies from attacking and even invading. But it's also true that no nuclear-armed government has ever been overthrown by outsiders. This is why many countries around the world continue to view these weapons as the ultimate deterrent and security guarantee.
Can anything stop the outbreak of a new nuclear arms race in the coming months? The best hope would be for the U.S. to reverse course immediately and renew its defense guarantees to its allies around the world. President Trump should clearly reaffirm Washington's commitment to NATO's Article V (which obligates all members to treat an attack on one as an attack against them all) and to America's non-NATO allies like Japan and South Korea. He should also quickly resume robust military and intelligence support for embattled Ukraine.
But even these moves — unlikely as they may be — might not be enough to prevent the world from going nuclear. After all, the U.S. has now made and broken such promises at least once before. Can it be relied on to keep them the next time?
Jonathan Tepperman is the editor-in-chief of The Catalyst and a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. He is the former editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, the former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, and author of '.'
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Chicago Tribune
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Its removal, she added, would allow park denizens to stroll in 'liberty and security.' She posted images of city workers prying out the two figures from the bench and the bronzed Castro and Guevara being ignominiously hauled away in a bulldozer. But the borough president later pivoted to a more ideological rationale. 'This city cannot ... promote or provide refuge for figures who injured human dignity, be it in Mexico or the rest of the world' Rojo de la Vega told Radio Formula. As to the fate of the dual bronzes, she said that officials may consider a sale, using the proceeds — likely from lefty purchasers enthralled with the Cuban uprising — for park upkeep. 'If we auction them off, it will mark a first — the communists will use their money, not someone else's,' Rojo de la Vega said. 'If they love them so much, they can put them in their garden, or their patio.' Not pleased was Mexico's leftist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who said she would speak to the Mexico City mayor — a political ally — about placing the monument elsewhere. The question isn't whether one embraces or rejects the views of the two protagonists, Sheinbaum argued to reporters on Thursday. The Castro-Che encounter, the president said, recalled 'a historic moment' that unfolded in Mexico and merited a display of memory. The contretemps here echoes spats in the United States about monuments glorifying Confederate generals: Critics decry the displays as exalting traitors and white supremacists, while others argue that the statues just reflect history. In the case of the Castro and Guevara likenesses, Sheinbaum suggested that their removal was partisan payback for her own signature monument-canceling moment — the banishment of one of Mexico's most illustrious landmarks, a virtual symbol of the city. In her former post, as mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum ordered the removal of a soaring bronze of Christopher Columbus, which, for more than a century, graced a pedestal in the capital's elegant Paseo de la Reforma. The stylized tableau depicted Columbus as a noble conqueror: one hand raised to the horizon, the other lifting a veil from a globe. For years, Indigenous activists and others staged protests at the statue, labeling Columbus and other conquistadores as perpetrators of genocide. In 2020, Sheinbaum finally ordered that the Columbus monument be taken down for renovations; it was never returned to its lofty perch. Its ejection enraged both Columbus' admirers and others who viewed the monument as an integral marker of the Mexican capital. They accuse Sheinbaum of bowing to political correctness. The traffic circle where Columbus long lent his presence has now been renamed the Women Who Fight roundabout, a rallying point for Indigenous, feminist and other protesters hoisting handwritten placards. The grandiose Columbus figure, meantime, remains out of public sight in museum storage. The Castro-Guevara bench, situated in an easy-to-miss park, didn't compare in size or significance to the towering Columbus of the stylish Paseo de la Reforma. But its removal lit up social media, rekindling historic enmities. 'An intent to erase the symbols of battle, of resistance, of Mexican-Cuban humanity,' César Huerta, a left-wing journalist, wrote on X, blasting the action as 'ideological censorship.' A radio commentator, José Luis Trueba Lara, bid good riddance, calling Guevara 'an assassin with good press' and Castro a 'bloodcurdling dictator.' Carlos Bravo Regidor, a columnist, berated the left for being more concerned 'about the retirement of some miserable statues of Fidel and el Che than for the misery suffered by those who live beneath the yoke of the Cuban dictatorship.' At the time of his 1955 encounter with Guevara, Castro, then 28, was not long out of a Cuban prison for an insurgent attack against the U.S.-backed Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Guevara, one year younger, was a physician from a middle-class Buenos Aires' upbringing brimming with revolutionary fervor — and a vision of a pan-Latin American socialist union, free of U.S. 'imperialism.' The two young men immediately hit if off, historians say, embarking on a lifelong friendship and collaboration in the revolutionary project. Both would be among 82 fighters aboard the yacht Granma that, in November 1956, set sail for Cuba from Mexico's Gulf coast. Their voyage, and subsequent guerrilla campaign, would culminate in 1959 in a historic overthrow of Batista and the imposition of a communist government in Havana. Fidel and el Che are long gone, and the book on the Cold War officially closed more than a quarter-century ago. But, as the fiery debate here about an unassuming bench statue illustrates, the ideological fault lines of the Cold War are far from completely obscured, at least not in Latin America. Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.
