Seven decades without a mushroom cloud doesn’t eliminate that specter.

By the 1950s, just years after U.S. B-29s dropped the first atomic bombs, Americans prepared for nuclear war.

At the same time, the U.S. led the fight to prevent more countries from barging into the nuclear club. In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy warned that “10, 15 or 20 nations” could have nuclear abilities by 1964.

Kennedy’s math was wrong; during those years only China joined the U.S., Soviet Union, Great Britain and France in gaining nuclear weapons. Today nine nations wield the bombs.

Seven decades without a mushroom cloud doesn’t eliminate that specter: The spread of these incredibly lethal arms to dangerous, unpredictable governments, and eventually perhaps to terror groups, added powerful incentive to the Singapore summit of President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Separately, Iran, now less constrained by a nuclear pact from which the U.S. has withdrawn, may re-energize its supposedly dormant nuke program. Iran’s foes, including Saudi Arabia, threaten a crash weapons program should Tehran attempt a breakout.

Terrorist leaders yearn to buy a bomb or radioactive material for a dirty bomb. Imagine if Iran’s West-loathing mullahs had a few weapons to spare.

You don’t have to agree with Trump’s hardball rhetoric to dismiss as wishful thinking the illusion of a nuclear-free world. No such world can exist while humans hold the knowledge to build nuclear weapons and the intent to use them.

America is indispensable in the fight to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. No other nation has the military, economic and diplomatic might — or the will — to squelch rogue nations or terror groups from acquiring or using nukes.

In the 1950s, the nuclear arms race spawned a pushback. President Dwight Eisenhower tried to forestall proliferation with his Atoms for Peace program: Give countries nuclear know-how for energy purposes but extract a pledge that they won’t develop nuclear weapons. Peaceful nuclear expertise spread, but so did weapons knowledge — to India, Israel, Pakistan.

There also have been victories: Libya scrapped its nuclear ambitions. Ukraine dismantled its Soviet-era arsenal. South Africa backtracked on its program.

Every president must decide how to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal. Every president seeks to diminish the possibility that a nuke will be fired in anger or error. And every president deals with looming nuclear threats across the globe.


That threat stalks the Trump-Kim negotiations. It stalks Western strategy toward Iran. It stalks all of us.


The Chicago Tribune