Candidate accuses the other

Clinton, Trump go nuclear

In attacks not seen since the '80s, each candidate accuses the other of risking world destruction.

By Michael Crowley

In a fitting conclusion to a scorched-earth battle, the 2016 campaign is ending amid talk of an impending nuclear holocaust.

In the race’s closing days, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are casting each other as threats to start nuclear war — a nightmare that once defined U.S. presidential contests but has seemed like an abstraction for decades.

One television advertisement by the Clinton campaign and another by a pro-Clinton Super PAC employ apocalyptic images of mushroom clouds to warn that Trump can’t be trusted with the awesome power of nuclear weapons. But in an interview with Reuters this week, Trump charged that it is Clinton, with her talk of intervening in Syria, who would start “World War III” with nuclear-armed Russia.

Each campaign feels it has the upper hand in the politics of Armageddon, which experts call a newly tangible threat amid surging tensions between the U.S. and Moscow.

Nuclear policy experts consider the talk of nuclear war — which has come as a surprise to them — a mixed blessing, potentially educating the public about nuclear issues but also frightening people at home and abroad to a degree unseen since the mid-1980s.

“There is a fear in the American public that you haven’t seen for a long time,” said Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofit that promotes global denuclearization. “There’s also a global fear,” Cirincione added, noting that on Thursday the United Nations General Assembly voted 123-38 to begin negotiations toward a treaty banning all nuclear weapons.

As part of their closing argument, the Clinton campaign and its allies have hammered Trump as too volatile to entrust with nuclear launch codes. One recent Clinton campaign ad features grave testimony from a former nuclear missile launch officer who speaks while seated near what appear to be the launch controls of an actual ICBM silo. “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone,” says the former officer, Bruce Blair, now a nuclear expert and disarmament activist at Princeton University.

A pro-Clinton Super PAC backed by former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley is also running an ad in Ohio which depicts a mushroom cloud and the ruins of Hiroshima. “One nuclear bomb can kill a million people. That’s more than all the men, women and children living in Columbus, Ohio,” the ad explains, before cutting to Donald Trump asking an interviewer, who tells him that Americans oppose the use of nuclear weapons, “Then why are we making them?”

Trump's fitness to oversee the nation’s nuclear arsenal is a frequent line of attack from Clinton supporters. In her July Democratic National Convention address, Clinton herself declared, “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

There is evidence that the nuclear issue is doing damage to Trump. The pro-Clinton liberal group MoveOn.org says that an online ad it created featuring seemingly glib comments Trump has made about nuclear weapons had an unusual impact. In what the group calls a “controlled study,” men over the age of 30 who watched the video were 7 percentage points more likely to back Clinton over Trump compared with those who did not watch the ad. And an August Morning Consult poll found voters trust Clinton over Trump to handle nuclear arms, 46-31.

But Trump has recently landed on a counter-argument, saying that Clinton’s talk of establishing a no-fly zone in Syria risks a military confrontation with Moscow that could escalate out of control. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dispatched his military to Syria to defend the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad from rebel forces, and many U.S. officials believe that Russia could shoot down U.S. jets if they tried to cordon off parts of Syrian territory into a no-fly zone.

“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” Trump told Reuters. “You’re going to end up in World War III over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.”

“You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country,” he added. Trump has repeatedly said he would like to see the U.S. and Russia establish friendly relations and cooperate in Syria.

Though his rhetoric is extreme, Trump’s warning is not totally unfounded, say many experts who study the U.S.-Russia relationship.

“It takes two to end up in military conflict which could escalate to nuclear, and if you trace out the trajectory of most things that candidate Clinton has said and most things that President Putin has said, they intersect at conflict,” said Matthew Rojanksy, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Rojanksy called it plausible that Russia or Russian-backed forces might shoot down a U.S. plane in Syria, leading to potential escalation on both sides that could quickly spin out of control.

“Does it guarantee you we go to war? No, but we do go to Defcon 1,” Rojansky said.

At the outset of the campaign last year, experts expected a focus on nuclear issues — but mainly on the July 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and the sort of proliferation and terrorism concerns that have dominated recent presidential campaigns.

Instead, the country and the world have been treated to a reminder that the U.S. and Russia still possess a combined 14,400 nuclear warheads, which a president can launch in just a few minutes without consulting anyone else in government.

“Why is anyone in this position? Why should anyone have the ability to launch a nuclear war in 15 minutes,” Cirincione asked. “Millions of people have been educated that the president can do this. There’s no vote, no Supreme Court appeal — you don't even need a Cabinet meeting.”

What’s unclear is whether the campaign debate will have any impact on nuclear policies under the next president, who will face major decisions about whether and how to pursue a modernization of the U.S. arsenal that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. public has not been engaged on nuclear issues,” said Adam Mount, a nuclear policy expert at the Clinton-friendly Center for American Progress. “It hasn’t been pressing in the American psyche. In 1982, there were a million people in the streets of New York” protesting American nuclear policies. “That’s almost unimaginable today.”

“I personally am wondering and grappling a lot with whether the public perceives the threat in the same way now, and whether it will have an impact on the international consciousness,” he added.