In today’s episode of Critical Conditions, Claire and I discussed what may be the most terrifying decision of the Trump presidency: his plan to resume nuclear testing. We’ve seen recklessness before — the gutting of USAID, the tariff tantrums against allies — but this one feels like a threshold moment. As Claire said at the start, “This is life or death.”
She began by recalling that the United States signed, though never ratified, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty back in 1996. To make detonations unnecessary, Washington built what became one of the most ambitious scientific programs in modern history — the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan. Its mission was to guarantee the safety and reliability of America’s nuclear deterrent without live tests.
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Claire described the staggering scale of that effort: the National Ignition Facility near San Francisco, where hundreds of lasers recreate the pressure and temperature of a thermonuclear blast; the subcritical experiments in Nevada that stop short of chain reaction; and the supercomputers that model detonations down to trillionths of a second. After three decades of such work, she noted, every expert — from the lab directors to the heads of Strategic Command — has said the same thing: our confidence in the stockpile is higher than ever. “Testing again,” she said, “would yield no new information, only instability.”
That instability, she argued, is not just technical but psychological. For Russia, China, and North Korea, Trump’s erratic behavior, his public confusion and his obsession with imagined slights will make America look unhinged. “You deter your enemies not by appearing insane but by convincing them you can absorb a shock and respond,” she said. If the man with sole launch authority cannot tell theater from reality, the danger is stumbling into a nuclear war.
My response was simpler in a way. Trump wants to look like a tough guy, angry that Putin just announced a new missile test and desperate to match it. I don’t think Trump — a man who loves tariffs but doesn’t understand them — can comprehend anything Claire said.
We wondered aloud whether anything could stop it. I noted that Congress technically controls the funding, but that process would take time, and the courts are unlikely to intervene given the treaty’s unratified status. The agencies that might have imposed restraint have been hollowed out — the National Nuclear Security Administration, for instance, is barely functioning after being DOGEd.
From there, the conversation widened, as it always does, to the larger culture that made such madness possible: I said America’s disdain for expertise was becoming a strategic liability.
Critical Conditions is a co-production of Ask Questions later and Claire’s The Cosmopolitan Globalist. The CG is well worth checking out.
By the end, the conversation veered toward the other global tremors of the week.
At the APEC meeting — which oddly represents most global trade and basically is a middle finger aimed at Europe — Trump’s false boasts about trade with South Korea fascinated Claire. I focused on the non-deal deal with China.
I also praised Rand Paul and the handful of Senate Republicans who voted down Trump’s tantrumesque Canada tariff addition. It won’t matter much, because the Republican caucus in the House is 100% lemmings — but it offered a glimmer of hope. Claire did not dispute me on the lemmings.
Reaching to find a measure of agreement with Trump, I argued that while his hatred of all imports is infantile, the monumental trade deficit with China is actually dire, since the West has created a danger dependence.
We ended on something less apocalyptic: the Dutch elections where the far right underperformed. And we resolved that next Monday, we would endeavor to produce a positive, uplifting podcast! Surely there is more good news in the world.
