Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Searchlight New Mexico: What will a second Trump presidency mean for nuclear weapons policy? 

Frank N. von Hippel: I worry about Trump being a basically destructive person, of course. He certainly wasn’t good for nuclear arms control in his first term. He took us out of both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Iran deal, which kept that country a year away from producing enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb. Now Iran could produce enough weapon-grade uranium for several bombs in a matter of weeks. He also set impossible conditions for new nuclear arms control with Russia. People around him were preparing to end our nuclear testing moratorium, so I’m not expecting good things. 

In Trump’s first term, he proposed a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile. Currently, people on both sides of the political spectrum, but certainly more unanimously on the Republican side, are calling for a buildup of nuclear weapons because of China’s buildup, as if having more nuclear destructive power would make us safer.

Searchlight: You founded Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security in 1974. I’m wondering if you see any similarities between then and now. Is the current moment as scary as it was 50 years ago? 

von Hippel: Well, it was scary 50 years ago, in some ways scarier. There was a tendency in those days toward going away from nuclear arms control. The people who came into office with President Ronald Reagan, a large fraction of them connected to the Committee on the Present Danger — a collection of nuclear hawks and analysts who assumed the worst about the Soviet Union’s intentions and capabilities — were convinced that the Soviet Union thought it could fight and win a nuclear war. And they wanted us to adopt that posture as well. That caused the nuclear weapons freeze movement. Reagan turned around in part because of pressure from the grassroots, and in part because he came to believe in Mikhail Gorbachev’s sincerity.

I don’t see the belief now that nuclear war can be fought and won. I do see, though, an irrational belief in nuclear deterrence. We live in a world full of miscalculations, and a miscalculation with regard to nuclear war could be an existential threat.

Searchlight: You’ve spent decades lobbying against the launch-on-alert status of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which would allow a president no more than a few minutes to discern whether a threat is real before starting a launch. Do you believe there will be heightened risks around the use of ICBMs under Trump’s second presidency that weren’t there before? 

von Hippel: There’s certainly a difference between Biden and Trump. If that happened to Biden, I have more confidence that he would understand enough to say: “I’m not sure we’re under attack.” In any case, a surprise attack on our ICBMs would not prevent us from retaliating if it’s real.

I think Trump tends to believe the last thing somebody told him. He believes all sorts of falsehoods and fantasies, partly because they’re convenient for him to believe and try to sell his followers. So I wouldn’t trust him in that situation. I wouldn’t trust his judgment. I think Biden, and Obama before him, have really been interested in a no-first-use posture. But neither of them could get that through the Pentagon, and both were faced with a huge amount of resistance from congressional Republicans.

Searchlight: Since LANL’s plutonium pits are slated to be used in the warhead that will outfit the Sentinel, do you see LANL’s mission changing or growing under this administration?

von Hippel: Pit production has grown extraordinarily under Biden, so it’s hard to see how anybody could push growth any faster. What could be significant is whether Trump calls for nuclear testing, because we haven’t had a nuclear test for more than 30 years. There’s a very simplistic argument that says we want to make sure the warheads still work. The last time there was a push for testing, LANL pushed back. They trust in the Stockpile Stewardship Program, and they have benefited enormously from it. They’re getting much more money than they did when they were testing.

And they have all sorts of wonderful new gadgets and computers and so on for that program. I think they are profoundly satisfied with the non-testing situation. Under the current leadership, LANL and the NNSA would be on the right side — what I consider the right side — if the issue of testing comes up again. But who knows what kind of leadership we’ll have under Trump.