Nobel Prize winner reveals what Donald Trump really thinks about nuclear weapons

It is 1985, Thatcher's Britain is booming, car phones are as big as your head, Back to the Future had just been released and across the pond a 39-year-old Donald Trump is New York's real estate king. Madonna's hit Material Girl stormed the charts this year, summing up a time of excess when the word "yuppie", young upwardly-mobile professional, was used in the Wall Street Journal to describe cash-hungry city workers.

But away from brazen Western capitalism, the Cold War and the looming spectre of a nuclear war which could annihilate everything was still a reality. In Moscow,Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had the ability to press the button on more than 30,000 atomic warheads. His counterpart, US President Ronald Reagan, had around 23,000 of the doomsday weapons.

The horror of the use of these apocalyptic devices was something close to the heart of future President Trump at this time, and still is today. In February 1985, Trump lost his beloved uncle John G Trump, a renowned physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking about his uncle during a campaign speech in 2016, Trump said he was "a great professor and scientist and engineer", adding: "Nuclear is powerful. My uncle explained that to me many years ago."

In 1985, soon after the death of his uncle, a younger Trump contacted the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War for what perhaps might seem a surprising reason. Speaking to the Sunday Express, Dr Jim Muller, a cardiologist at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and co-founder of IPPNW, revealed Trump contacted the organisation asking for help to speak to Gorbachev.

"Trump had a plan to prevent nuclear war," explains Dr Muller, who still practices medicine aged 82. "Trump called my mentor Dr Bernard Lown, who had met with Gorbachev several times, and asked if he could make introductions.

"Lown flew to New York and met with Trump and agreed to help."

It's not known exactly when the first Trump-Gorbachev conversation took place but the pair first met face-to-face at a State Department dinner for the Soviet leader held in Washington DC in 1987. A year later Trump invited the Russian to a private meal at his own Trump Tower complex in New York. The offer was accepted but sadly was put off after a change in itinerary.

An article in TIME magazine about the proposed meeting read Trump "who does not discourage talk of his presidential ambitions and who buys newspaper ads laying out his plans for world nuclear disarmament", planned to act as "a representative of the American people "in showing the Communist leader all that capitalism had to offer".

Dr Muller won what Trump has always said he desires, a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1985 for his work with IPPNW.

He adds: "It's a paradoxical situation because Trump has said that he would like to abolish all nuclear weapons, but in contrast to that he is increasing spending on nuclear weapons. So his words differ from his deeds."

Those deeds included a post on social media last week announcing the American nuclear programme had been updated during his first term in office, "because of the tremendous destructive power, I hated to do it but had no choice!," he wrote.

However, despite his hate for the weapons, Trump's post added: "Because of other countries' testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis."

Commenting on the Commander-in-Chief's statement, Dr Muller said: "Resumption of nuclear detonations will reverse 30 years of progress against the environmental problems of such testing.

"And resumed testing will likely stimulate an increase in the nuclear arms race currently in progress. The end result for all nations is an increased risk of destruction in a nuclear war.

"To achieve national security the process should be going in the opposite direction, toward elimination of

all nuclear weapons under the supervision of a strengthened and improved UN."

There are some glimmers of hope for humanity, as Dr Muller revealed that despite Russia's invasion of Ukraine and president Vladimir Putin's increasing isolation from the international community, US and Russian nuclear activists and thinkers are still in contact.

"Putin is quite intelligent, as is Trump in a certain way, and I think neither one of them want to use them (nuclear weapons), and they probably realise that they are unusable," continued Dr Muller.

"Would Putin and Trump be better off building conventional weapons? Trump is spending a trillion dollars on nuclear weapons, is that money really well spent?"

Dr Muller added: "After President Harry Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan he proposed the abolition of all nuclear weapons under UN supervision, most people don't know that.

"He killed 30,000 children with that decision (to use the nuclear bomb). This is one of the problems of nuclear war, it's so massive, it cannot be imagined.

"But if you imagine a football stadium with 30,000 children and you take them out and burn them to death one at a time. That's the atrocity."