Wakeup Alarms, Compliments of
Deranged Nuclear Super-powers
Scott Fina / Santa Maria Times
(October 24, 2025) — Several times a year, test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at Vandenberg Space Force Base — usually late at night — disturb the sleep of many folks living in northern Santa Barbara County.
The base sends these missiles approximately 4,200 miles to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. I perceive these launches as wakeup warnings that our human existence hangs in a nuclear balance.
What follows is a recent example of why.
On Sept. 30, President Trump addressed nearly 800 generals and admirals at an auditorium in Marine Base Quantico in Virginia. Trump’s speech was long and comedic in places. It was also distressing.
Here I refer to the president’s discussion on America’s nuclear forces.
Consider these comments Trump made in his address:
“We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made. Number one, you can’t detect it. There’s no way. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines. … I moved a submarine or two, I won’t say about the two, over to the coast of Russia. …”
This is our American president bragging, before the world, about his deployment of two Trident submarines along the Russian coast carrying up to 20 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Each sub has the firepower to make it the “sixth most powerful nuclear power in the world,” according to the U.S. Department of War.
Trump was not the only president recently flexing his nation’s nuclear muscles.
On Wednesday, Putin put on his own nuclear presentation, overseeing a test launch of his own unarmed ICBM.
Knowing the precarious international circumstances of the Russian-Ukraine conflict, one asks, are not the U.S. and Russia acting like insane nuclear super powers, threatening humanityVladimi and life as we know it?
In fact, the nuclear policies and programs — and mentality — of the U.S. and Russia are very similar.
First, there are the nuclear arsenals and delivery systems.
Like the U.S., Russia has a triad of nuclear weapon systems: land-based ICBMs, and nuclear-armed bombers and submarines. Both nations have the nuclear force to annihilate humanity numerous times over.
Then there are similar nuclear command policies.
According to Congress, Trump has sole authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. So does Putin, according to a binding nuclear document titled, “FUNDAMENTALS of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence.”
Both presidents have 24-hour access to briefcases, the “nuclear football” and “Cheget,” respectively, by which they enter codes to launch a nuclear attack.
In sum, American and Russian presidents can start a nuclear war, unimpeded by checks and balances on their decisions to do so.
Despite this looming existential nuclear threat, the leaderships and militaries of the U.S. and Russia justify possessing such weaponry on the basis of “deterrence”, a national defense, as they see it.
Both the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weapon systems supposedly as means of deterrence. This is ludicrous!
Both the U.S. and Russian nuclear policies include a preemptive, first strike option against even a nonnuclear attack as justifiable. However, once a nuclear adversary launches a nuclear attack on another, deterrence, by its very definition, disappears for the targeted recipient.
Deterrence can also hold a related moral dilemma. Here I refer readers to a book by Ron Rosenbaum, “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.”
Rosenbaum notes that the military officers who will fire off the armed ICBMs — (all who are trained at Vandenberg) — might find themselves in a dilemma if they know nuclear missiles are already coming at the U.S.
A missileer may no longer see launching nuclear missiles as a defensive act, but a retaliation killing millions of people. Would it not be moral and humane for these officers to refuse to launch the missiles to save the lives of millions of innocent people, regardless of who they are?
The United Nations best grasps sanity when it comes to nuclear weaponry. Despite decades of treaty-making starting in the 1960s and leading into the 21st Century, the world remains awash with nuclear weapons, ever at the edge of nuclear Armageddon.
In 2017, the UN took an aggressive different approach and adopted the “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” (TPNW). The TPNW, which came into force in January of 2021, calls for all nations to never “develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons” or “use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.”
As of Sept. 26, 99 nations have joined the TPNW. Unfortunately, no nuclear power has yet to do so.
The TPNW is radical, comprehensive and urgent. It rejects the notion of nuclear deterrence that in actuality, makes all nations and peoples unsafe. The treaty recognizes the pervasive insanity that infects nuclear powers.
The U.S. brought nuclear weapons into the world, and is the only nation to have used them. In the TPNW’s vein of thinking, Americans should call for the U.S. to unilaterally disarm itself of nuclear weaponry and programs.
Our nation should join and comply with the terms of the TPNW, and lead other nuclear powers in doing so.
Scott Fina is a Santa Maria resident.
