U.S. President Donald Trump’s willingness to attack adversaries while rattling allies is threatening to push the world into a new nuclear age.
From the North Atlantic to the West Pacific, governments are debating more publicly than before whether they, too, must get the bomb. Germany and Poland, who have long been satisfied to sit under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, have in the wake of Trump’s musings about taking Greenland welcomed French overtures about extending the country’s own strategic deterrent across the continent.
China and Russia, both longstanding members of the exclusive club of nuclear-armed nations, have raised alarm about the risk of weapons proliferation in Japan and South Korea, even as they upgrade their own arsenals. The U.S., the only country to use a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, is assessing a return to atomic bomb tests to comply with an executive order by Trump after a hiatus of more than three decades.