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Yet Obama's real "nuclear legacy" is something else entirely. Over his eight years in office, the White House has initiated one of the most sweeping expansions of its nuclear capabilities in US history.

The Pentagon has embarked upon a $1 trillion nuclear modernization program, seeking to make US nuclear weapons smaller, faster, more maneuverable and easier to use on the battlefield. The effect of this program is, as General James E. Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Times earlier this year, "to make the weapon more thinkable."

At a cost of some $97 billion, the Navy is on track to replace its Ohio-class submarines, each of which is by itself equivalent to the world's fifth-ranking nuclear power, with a new generation of ballistic missile submarines.

The Air Force, meanwhile, has contracted Northrop Grumman to build up to 100 next-generation B-21 nuclear-capable bombers, at a cost of nearly $60 billion. It is also in the midst of developing, at the cost of $20 billion, the so-called Long-Range Stand-Off Missile, which is capable of maneuvering at high speeds to deliver a nuclear payload behind enemy air defenses.

Experts have warned that the development of such a "dual use" nuclear-capable cruise missile makes the potential for a catastrophic miscalculation substantially greater, as countries attacked by these weapons, in addition to having little time to respond, have no way of knowing whether their payload is "conventional" or nuclear.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Air Force also plans to spend another $85 billion to develop a set of new intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to buy some 642 of the new ICBMs "at an average cost of $66.4 million each to support a deployed force of 400 weapons."

The dizzying pace of the US nuclear modernization program comes in the context of a deepening global geopolitical crisis, at the center of which is the ever expanding war drive of American imperialism.

Beginning with economic crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American ruling class sought to offset the economic decline of US capitalism through the ever-more naked use of military force. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this process went into overdrive, kicking off a quarter century of intensifying war around the globe. Now, US-led regional wars and proxy conflicts, particularly in Syria, are metastasizing into ever-more direct conflicts with larger competitors, including Russia and China.

With the crisis-ridden US election dominated by allegations from the Clinton campaign of Russian cyberattacks and political subversion, together with ongoing and deepening tensions with China, the United States is sending a clear signal that it is thinking about the "unthinkable."

Eighty years ago, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky warned, "In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom." Anyone who believes that the US would never again use nuclear weapons is underestimating not only the extent of the internal and external crisis confronting American imperialism, but the level of violence and criminality of which the American ruling class is capable.

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