Sign Letter to be Delivered to President Trump
January 2 - January 22
A letter initiated by Warheads to Windmills is circulating for signatures and will be delivered to President Donald Trump on January 22, 2025, on the 4th anniversary of the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entry into force. Signatures will be accepted through January 20, 2025. Please share widely!
ORGANIZATION SIGN ON
INDIVIDUAL SIGN ON
January 22, 2025
Dear President Trump,
You have many problems to address as you enter the White House, but according to the assessment you gave to Sean Hannity on December 3, 2024, “nuclear weapons are the biggest problem we have.”
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE TOO BIG A RISK
Your biggest problem includes the risk of an escalation to nuclear war at any moment in Europe, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, South Asia, or the South China Sea. It includes the ever-present risk of a full-scale nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia that could be triggered by simple human or computer error, a cyberattack, miscalculation or misunderstanding on either side.
Mr. President, so long as these weapons remain in the arsenals of any country, there is a steadily increasing risk that they will be used. And despite decades of research and billions of dollars of investment, there is no guaranteed way to protect America from even a single incoming nuclear missile.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE
Nuclear weapons are also one of the most expensive items in the entire federal budget. As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy pointed out in their November 20, 2024, article in the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is awash with cost overruns and failed audits. And one of the biggest expenditures within the Pentagon budget is for a whole new generation of nuclear weapons.
Of course, these costs are spread across a large number of line items, not only in the DOD budget but also in the DOE budget. Altogether, the current plan is to spend at least $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to upgrade every element of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. It is likely to end up costing significantly more than that. This is all for weapons that we would be better off without and cannot even use.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS CANNOT BE USED TO WIN WARS
Mr. President, you yourself asked the very important question during your first term: “Why do we have nuclear weapons if we can’t use them?” Well, the truth is, we can’t use them unless we want to risk an all-out nuclear war in which millions, if not billions, would die and no one would emerge victorious.
Even if nuclear weapons landed only on other countries, we here in the United States would still suffer the consequences. That’s because the radioactive debris from a nuclear blast rises into the upper atmosphere and can circulate the entire globe before coming down as radioactive fallout weeks or even months later. Even if winds did not carry the immediate fallout towards the U.S. or our troops in other parts of the world, the long-term fallout would certainly affect us here.
And on top of the radioactive fallout, the soot rising up from smouldering cities and military facilities is likely to create freezing temperatures in some of the key grain-growing regions of the world, including the Great Plains. This could lead to millions more Americans dying from starvation over subsequent years.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE A GRAVE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY
And despite what your national security experts may tell you, eliminating nuclear weapons would not damage the national security of the United States in any way. As you know very well, the United States has the most advanced, most powerful conventional (non-nuclear) armed forces in the world — by far.
None of our potential adversaries can come close to threatening the United States with their conventional forces. It is only their nuclear weapons that pose any threat at all to the United States. With nuclear weapons, even an extremely poor country like North Korea is capable of threatening the United States.
And the longer this problem goes unresolved, the more other countries are going to want nuclear weapons and are going to find a way to acquire them, making the United States increasingly more insecure as a result. With no nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, the United States would be significantly more secure than it is today.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE NOT AN EFFECTIVE DETERRENT
Mr. President, the whole rationale for maintaining an arsenal of nuclear weapons is supposedly because they are the ultimate deterrent. And yet our possession of nuclear weapons clearly did not prevent the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Nor has Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons prevented the United States from arming and supporting Ukraine.
Since 1945, the U.S. has fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Libya, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Possession of nuclear weapons did not “deter” any of those wars, nor indeed did possession of nuclear weapons ensure that the US won any of those wars.
Threats to use nuclear weapons are meaningless unless they are carried out. And they are never carried out for the very simple reason that to do so would be an act of suicide and what political leader would make that choice?
NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAN BE ELIMINATED
The reality is that there is nothing technically standing in the way of eliminating all nuclear weapons from just nine countries that have them. Other weapons of mass destruction have been largely eliminated from the world’s arsenals already. But it requires initiative from the United States to make it happen. And that requires a President willing to show leadership on this issue.
You could, for instance, decide tomorrow to sign, on behalf of the United States, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW or “Nuclear Ban Treaty”), inviting the other eight nuclear-armed nations to join you in signing it.
The act of signing this treaty does not by itself commit the United States to anything other than the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons — a goal we have been committed to for over 50 years. Treaty obligations only kick in after ratification by the Senate, which leaves ample time to negotiate the details of a verifiable disarmament process with those other eight countries.
And yet, signing the Nuclear Ban Treaty would be the single most powerful thing you can do as President to kick-start the elimination of these weapons. Mr. President, you could win the Nobel Peace Prize for doing this, and the whole world would celebrate the lifting of this existential threat hanging over us all.
Mr. President, we, the undersigned organizations and individuals, urge you to address this, your biggest problem, as soon as possible. Please let us know how we can help you in this endeavor.
Sincerely yours,