Publications
Trump Administration, Nuclear Security Governance, and the Costs of Strategic Disengagement
Tahir Azad
Analysis Series
Analysis/0040/June/2026/London-Dialogue. 23 June 2026
1. Introduction
For three decades following the end of the Cold War, the United States served as the indispensable architect of the global nuclear safety and security regime. Through the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, the Nuclear Security Summits convened under Presidents Bush and Obama, and sustained engagement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Washington built and maintained a layered architecture to prevent the proliferation of fissile materials and to ensure that civil and military nuclear infrastructure worldwide remained safe. This role was not merely altruistic; it reflected a strategic calculation that a world of secured nuclear materials was a world safer for American interests.
The second Trump administration has substantially departed from this tradition. Nuclear safety and security have been relegated in the hierarchy of US strategic priorities, overshadowed by transactional dealmaking, an aversion to multilateral commitments, and a foreign policy doctrine that privileges coercive leverage over institutional governance. The June 2025 US military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, conducted under Operation Midnight Hammer, crystallised this reorientation in ways that demand serious analytical attention.
This analysis examines the strategic and institutional consequences of Trump’s disengagement from nuclear safety and security governance. It argues that the cumulative effect of budget cuts, institutional marginalisation, and the willingness to treat nuclear sites as legitimate military targets risks dismantling the guardrails that have prevented catastrophic nuclear accidents and deliberate radiological incidents for over three decades.
2. From Obama to Trump: The Reversal of Nuclear Security Leadership
2.1 The Obama-Era Framework
The Obama administration placed nuclear security at the apex of its national security agenda. President Obama’s April 2009 Prague Speech articulated a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and established the normative foundation for the four Nuclear Security Summits held between 2010 and 2016. These summits engaged over fifty heads of state, resulting in the removal or elimination of significant quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from vulnerable locations worldwide, as documented by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Obama administration also sustained and expanded the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which houses the primary US programmes for global nuclear material security. Engagement with the IAEA was robust, and the United States contributed materially and diplomatically to the development of the Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM), which entered into force in 2016 and represents the most comprehensive international legal instrument on nuclear security.
2.2 The First Trump Term: Early Warning Signs
The first Trump administration (2017-2021) provided early indications of a shift in priorities. The administration proposed significant budget reductions to the NNSA’s defence nuclear nonproliferation programmes. According to the Carnegie, the fiscal year 2018 budget request included cuts of approximately $120 million to defence nuclear nonproliferation, targeting precisely those programmes responsible for securing vulnerable nuclear materials globally.
The withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018 was emblematic of a broader pattern of disengaging from multilateral frameworks that, whatever their limitations, provided structured mechanisms for monitoring and constraining nuclear activities. The State Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Safety and Security experienced reduced political engagement, and the Nuclear Security Summit process, having run its course under Obama, was not succeeded by any comparable multilateral mechanism under Trump.
3. The Second Term: Institutional Erosion and Strategic Reorientation
3.1 Budget Priorities and Institutional Marginalisation
The second Trump administration, taking office in January 2025, has accelerated the trends of the first. The broader agenda of federal downsizing pursued through the Department of Government Efficiency has not spared national security institutions, including those with nuclear remits. Reports from the Federation of American Scientists have noted staff reductions and programme restructuring within the NNSA, with particular concern about continuity in international nuclear security engagement programmes.
The administration’s 2025 foreign policy posture has been characterised by an explicit preference for bilateral transactional arrangements over multilateral frameworks. This disposition is structurally adverse to nuclear security governance, which is inherently multilateral and depends on sustained institutional capacity, shared technical standards, and long-term relationship-building with partner states. As the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has consistently documented, nuclear security is a global commons problem: weaknesses in one state’s nuclear material security create risks that extend beyond national borders.
3.2 The IAEA Relationship
The United States has historically been the largest single contributor to the IAEA, providing approximately 25 per cent of the agency’s regular budget and significant extrabudgetary contributions to nuclear security and safeguards activities. The Trump administration’s broader pattern of reducing contributions to international organisations raises questions about the sustainability of this support.
Of particular concern is the IAEA’s Nuclear Security Fund, which supports nuclear security activities in member states that lack the domestic capacity to implement robust security measures independently. This fund is almost entirely dependent on voluntary contributions from donor states. Any reduction in US contributions risks cascading effects on nuclear security capacity in regions where the risks of nuclear material theft or sabotage are highest.
4. Operation Midnight Hammer and the Norm of Nuclear Site Inviolability
4.1 The Strike and Its Immediate Context
The June 2025 US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, reportedly targeting sites including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, represents the most direct manifestation of the Trump administration’s reorientation away from nuclear safety norms. According to reporting by the BBC and Reuters, the strikes employed B-2 strategic bombers and GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators designed to destroy hardened underground facilities.
The strategic rationale advanced by the administration centred on preventing Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. This logic is understandable within a narrow deterrence framework. However, the decision to strike nuclear sites rather than pursue further diplomatic or sanctions-based approaches reflects a judgement that the risks of radiological release and the destruction of the multilateral non-proliferation framework are acceptable costs. This judgement merits serious scrutiny.
4.2 Radiological and Safety Implications
Striking nuclear facilities, even when conducted with precision munitions, carries inherent radiological risks. The IAEA’s own guidance on nuclear security emphasises that nuclear facilities represent a distinct category of infrastructure precisely because their destruction can release radioactive material into the environment, endangering civilian populations and contaminating land and water resources over extended periods and distances.
The Fordow facility, buried deep within a mountain, presents particular challenges. The destruction of uranium enrichment centrifuges can generate uranium hexafluoride (UF₆), a toxic and radioactive compound. While the enriched uranium at Fordow was reportedly at levels below weapons grade, even low-enriched uranium hexafluoride poses significant health risks if dispersed. Independent analysts at the Union of Concerned Scientists have long warned that strikes on nuclear facilities carry non-trivial probabilities of radioactive contamination, irrespective of the precision of the munitions employed.
4.3 The Precedent Problem
Beyond the immediate radiological implications, the strike establishes a precedent of considerable strategic consequence. The norm that nuclear facilities should not be subjected to military attack has been one of the most robust in the international system, observed even during intense conventional conflicts. Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor and the 2007 strike on the Al-Kibar facility in Syria were exceptional and contested; they targeted facilities at early stages of construction, without operational nuclear material.
The 2025 US strikes on operational Iranian enrichment facilities mark a qualitative departure. If the world’s pre-eminent nuclear power treats operational enrichment sites as legitimate military targets, it becomes correspondingly more difficult to argue that other states should not adopt similar doctrines. The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) has warned for years that the erosion of nuclear site inviolability represents one of the most underappreciated risks to the global nuclear order.
5. Strategic Competitors and the Governance Vacuum
US disengagement from nuclear safety governance does not occur in a strategic vacuum. It creates space for other actors, most notably China and Russia, to shape the normative and institutional landscape.
Russia, through Rosatom, its state nuclear corporation, is the dominant global exporter of civilian nuclear power technology, with active construction projects across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Rosatom’s commercial engagement creates deep dependencies in recipient states and allows Russia to project influence over the nuclear governance frameworks of a growing number of countries. Moscow has shown limited enthusiasm for robust nuclear security standards that might complicate its commercial interests.
China, similarly, has expanded its civil nuclear exports through the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), offering reactor technology to states in South and Southeast Asia and Africa. As documented in SIPRI’s annual yearbooks, China’s approach to nuclear cooperation prioritises commercial and strategic objectives, with nuclear security conditionality playing a distinctly secondary role.
The diminution of US leadership creates conditions in which the nuclear security standards embedded in the IAEA’s INFCIRC/225 recommendations and in bilateral US nuclear cooperation agreements (123 Agreements) may be progressively diluted as the leverage Washington once exercised through its centrality to the nuclear supply chain erodes.
6. South Asian and Indo-Pacific Dimensions
The implications of US nuclear security disengagement are particularly acute in South Asia. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed states operating outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and both face complex challenges in maintaining robust nuclear security. The May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, triggered by the Pahalgam terrorist attack and escalating to the use of conventional missile strikes under Operation Sindoor, underscored the continued volatility of the South Asian nuclear environment.
US engagement with both states on nuclear security matters has historically proceeded through quiet diplomatic channels, supplemented by IAEA technical cooperation programmes. A less engaged Washington is less well-positioned to exercise the kind of stabilising influence that helped manage previous India-Pakistan crises, including the 1999 Kargil conflict and the 2001-2002 standoff. The RAND Corporation has documented the importance of US crisis management engagement in South Asia across multiple studies.
In the Indo-Pacific more broadly, North Korea’s continued development of its nuclear programme and missile delivery systems represents an ongoing challenge that requires sustained multilateral engagement. The Trump administration’s preference for direct bilateral summitry with Pyongyang, while not without merit as a tactical approach, has not produced verifiable reductions in North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and has at times come at the cost of allied coordination within frameworks such as the Extended Deterrence Policy Committee with South Korea and Japan.
7. The Costs of Disengagement: A Structural Assessment
The costs of US disengagement from nuclear safety and security governance are structural rather than merely symbolic. They manifest across three dimensions.
First, there is the material dimension. US funding and technical assistance have been central to the implementation of nuclear security upgrades worldwide, from securing orphaned radioactive sources in the former Soviet Union to building physical protection systems at research reactors in developing countries. Reduced US engagement translates directly into reduced capacity in the states most vulnerable to nuclear security failures. The IAEA’s Nuclear Security Series provides the technical standards; US-funded programmes have historically been the primary mechanism for implementing them.
Second, there is the normative dimension. US leadership gave the global nuclear security architecture its political weight. When Washington prioritised nuclear security, other states followed. The Nuclear Security Summits were effective precisely because US convening power brought heads of government to the table and elevated nuclear security from a technical matter to a head-of-state priority. Without US leadership, nuclear security risks becoming a second-order concern for states that might otherwise have treated it as a priority.
Third, there is the precedent dimension. The willingness to strike operational nuclear facilities, to reduce contributions to multilateral nuclear security bodies, and to frame nuclear issues primarily through the lens of deterrence and coercion rather than safety and governance establishes precedents that will be difficult to reverse. Future administrations seeking to reassert US leadership in nuclear security governance will face a more permissive normative environment and a more degraded institutional infrastructure than they might otherwise have inherited.
Conclusion
The Trump administration’s strategic reorientation has placed nuclear safety and security in a position of institutional and normative vulnerability that has no clear precedent in the post-Cold War period. The systematic deprioritisation of nuclear security funding, the hollowing of multilateral engagement, and most acutely the willingness to conduct strikes against operational nuclear facilities together constitute a departure from the governance framework that has kept the world from experiencing a catastrophic nuclear security incident since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
This is not an argument that the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities was without strategic logic within its own terms. The prevention of Iranian nuclear weapons capability is a legitimate and longstanding objective of US policy. Nor is it an argument that previous administrations managed the tensions between deterrence and governance without difficulty. It is an argument, rather, that the costs of the current approach are structural and cumulative and that they are being incurred without adequate strategic deliberation about what is being dismantled and how difficult it will be to rebuild.
Analysts assess that the degradation of US nuclear security leadership, if sustained, will produce a global nuclear environment that is meaningfully less safe by the end of the decade. The guardrails are not broken yet, but they are under significant strain, and the institutions that maintain them are being weakened at precisely the moment when the risk landscape, from South Asia to the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, is becoming more complex.
Restoring US engagement with nuclear safety and security governance does not require abandoning deterrence or strategic coercion as policy instruments. It requires recognising that these instruments and the safety architecture are complements, not substitutes, and that the erosion of the latter ultimately undermines the credibility and sustainability of the former. The costs of rebuilding broken guardrails are invariably higher than the costs of maintaining them.
Tahir Azad
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