Will Trump break the nuclear taboo?

He has already left a lengthy trail of destruction, but the chilling risk is that the United States’ volatile leader could go on to reach for the nuclear button.

Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes

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US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has been on quite a roll. Since just the beginning of the year, he has kidnapped the Venezuelan president, threatened to invade Greenland and Colombia, and now dragged the US – and seemingly much of the Middle East – into a new war by joining with Israel to attack Iran, something that even the biggest hawks among recent US presidents have managed to avoid. That’s on top of bombing seven countries in 2025.

The 2024 campaign promises of a peace president who will end the forever wars have evaporated, only to be replaced by unrestrained use of military force and a seeming disdain for diplomacy. As the US comedy show Saturday Night Live put it, Trump, along with his United Nations–replacing Board of Peace, got ‘bored of peace’.

Breaking international law seems to be a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s actions, consistent with his admission that he is expressly not guided by international law, norms, traditions or common decency, but by ‘my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me’.

Trump’s power-drunk top advisors are just as out of control. Secretary of War Pete ‘Kill them all’ Hegseth stated that his goal is to ‘unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy’ and to ‘untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralise, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country’. At the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State ‘little Marco’ Rubio bemoaned the end of the era of colonialism and called for returning to ‘the West’s age of dominance’. Deputy chief of staff Stephen ‘Genghis’ Miller declared, ‘We live in a world … that is governed by force, that is governed by power.’

In addition to hegemonic actions in the conventional military realm, Trump has been escalating when it comes to nuclear weapons. He rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to extend the New START treaty for another year, making possible an unconstrained nuclear arms race alongside an ongoing modernisation race. He has also announced that the US will resume nuclear testing. Even without the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and tensions with China, these actions and threats would be destabilising and dangerous.

Trump is the mean and out-of-control bully on the global playground. Except that this bully has the sole authority to launch thousands of nuclear warheads.

It would be the ultimate expression of Trump’s unbounded power for him to break the one remaining international taboo – which, despite far too many close calls, has persisted for more than 80 years – detonating a nuclear weapon. There are many indications that, despite the US and Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, this war may not be going well for them. But that need not be the pretext for using a nuclear weapon. In Trump’s mind, the more unprovoked, outrageous and unnecessary something is, the better. Given his fragile ego and rapidly deteriorating mental powers – going off on bizarre rants about poisonous snakes in Peru or the White House drapes – the more unhinged he is, the more he thinks it demonstrates his dominance.

Since the end of the Cold War, many people who pay attention have worried about an accidental or a miscalculated stumble into nuclear war. But with Trump breaking every taboo domestically and internationally, demonstrating that he is above the law and can do as he pleases at every turn, the ultimate taboo waiting to be broken is the nuclear one. This may in fact be part of the reason why Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping have muted their response to the attacks on Iran. They know how dangerous Trump is, and they don’t want to provoke him.

There are now reports from US Air Force veteran Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that his organisation has received calls from more than 200 soldiers on over 50 military bases that ‘have one damn thing in freaking common … the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new “biblically sanctioned” war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian “end times” as vividly described in the New Testament book of Revelation’. The commander of one combat unit told non-commissioned officers ‘that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”’.

US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned in June that we were ‘closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before’. We might be a lot closer than even she realised.       

Peter Kuznick is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, DC. He is also the author of numerous books and co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The Untold History of the United States.

Ivana Nikolic Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. Her work on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands has been covered widely. Her writing has appeared in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, The Hill, Scientific American, The Diplomat, Truthout, Transcend Media Service and elsewhere.

First published in Arabic by Al Jazeera, the above article is reproduced from Common Dreams (www.commondreams.org) under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

*Third World Resurgence No. 366, 2026/1, pp 30-31