We are Inviting a Nuclear Catastrophe

The Nobel Committee Sent Us an Important Warning This Morning

While the ability of human beings to compartmentalize oblivion is essential to our survival, it also carries with it great dangers. We learn to take that which poses immense danger and push it far, far away from the center of our daily lives. We make it so remote that it almost does not seem real.

If we can do that with our own inevitable ends, it is only natural that we learn to do it with those things that might cause our ends or those of our loved ones or our world.

Smokers smoke despite knowing it can kill them. Others abuse deadly drugs or pump their arteries full of fats that will clog them and raise the likelihood of a heart attack. Global warming is tomorrow’s problem. Not having a national plan for dealing with the next pandemic doesn’t seem that urgent even though a million people died just a couple of years ago because we were foolish and unprepared back then. Allowing gun ownership to proliferate in our society or speeding on a motorcycle on wet road has never killed me or my children before so I don’t have to worry about it today.

The last spin of the cylinder didn’t kill me in this game of Russian Roulette so perhaps the next one won’t either.

It may feel like positive adaptive behavior but it is not. The capacity to suppress our fears of that which may kill us or death itself is actually death-inviting behavior.

This point was well-made today by the committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize. It could not be a more pointed or timely message to American voters.

As you may have already read, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo. The average American probably never heard of them. Indeed, our ignorance about them may be as founded in our guilt as the limitations of what we read about or follow in the world.

Nihon Hidankyo is a group of survivors of the U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki who have dedicated themselves to achieving a “world free of nuclear weapons.” That may seem like an abstract dream to you. Rest assured it does not to those who survived the horror the inflicted on those two cities in the final days of World War II. According to the invaluable work done by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists between 110,000 and 200,000 people died as a consequence of those attacks—some vaporized in an instant, some who died agonizing deaths as a result of being incinerated or as a consequence of radiation poisoning.

In the years since, some of those who managed to live and learn to cope with the unimaginable losses of family, friends and community turned their attention to insuring that no human being would ever again suffer as they and those they loved did. There is something so spectacularly beautiful in the fact that humans might respond that way rather than focus on recrimination and revenge that it is worthy of the kind of reflection and respect that should come with the award of the Peace Prize.

But it would dishonor the extraordinary work of this group if we did not realize how far their work was from being complete or the role all of us play in blocking that work. Now, you may protest and say, no, I am not complicit in the build up of nuclear weapons worldwide or in the creation of institutions or circumstances that might one day lead to their use. But is that really true?

The United States has one of the world’s two most deadly nuclear arsenals. According to the Arms Control Association, we possess 5748 nuclear warheads. Russia has 5,580. Between our two countries, we hold 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal. China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea possess the rest. A single large modern nuclear warhead detonated over a city could kill many millions of people. It is estimated that a nuclear war between the United States and Russia could kill hundreds of millions.

You have heard these statistics. If you were raised in my generation, you were marched into the hall in elementary school and told to place your head between your knees and cover your head with your winter jackets in drills to prepare you for what you might do during a nuclear attack. You’ve seen movies of nuclear weapons being detonated or that told stories of the threat or reality of nuclear conflict. Perhaps you have even read first-hand accounts of the horrors we inflicted on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (No? Start with this, written in 1946 by John Hershey for The New Yorker.)

But you don’t think about this daily, do you? You have managed to file it away. You vote for administration after administration that commits itself to maintaining or “modernizing” or sometimes even expanding our nuclear arsenal. You have observed from a distance as some nuclear weapons treaties have expired. Perhaps you did not even notice when Vladimir Putin two years ago said he would “suspend” the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia. Perhaps you were unaware that New START expires in 2026, during the term of the next president of the United States.

Perhaps you have not actively supported the elimination of nuclear weapons as decency and rationality dictate we all should.

Perhaps you were unaware that Donald Trump, when president the last time around, let New START lapse and it was left to the Biden-Harris administration to sign the extension currently in effect. Perhaps you were unaware that Trump has spoken casually about the inevitably of further nuclear proliferation in the world or that he promoted the idea of “more useable” nuclear weapons. You may have heard that he once said nuclear weapons could be used to stop hurricanes and you may even have laughed at the idea. But you probably were not laughing when he recklessly threatened war with nuclear North Korea, a war that could produce a nuclear exchange that could erase South Korea from the map and kill tens of millions.

Does all that seem abstract to you? Does hearing that Trump poses a risk to the world non-proliferation regime numb your brain? Then you too are speeding, drunk and helmetless down a wet highway on your motorcycle.

Perhaps it would seem less abstract if I were to frame the stark reality of this moment in America in nuclear terms for you. In less than four weeks from now, the voters of the United States will choose who we are going to put in charge of the world’s most advanced nuclear arsenal at a particularly dangerous moment in world history. Trump, as of now, has a roughly equal shot at the job than the far more responsible, capable, stable Kamala Harris. It is why so many Democratic, Republican and Independent leaders from the national security community support her…and it is why they consider the choice to be so consequential.

But it could be Trump. It could be Trump who will assume next January the ability to launch—on his authority alone—a nuclear attack anywhere in the world. Such an attack would commence within just a few minutes after the president gave the order to attack. If an attack were threatened against us, it would be Trump who would have just 15 minutes to determine whether and how we were to respond.

Yes, it would be that same impulsive Trump we know so well from his televised outbursts, the same Trump who would rail uncontrollably at his staff while last in office, the same Trump whose mental faculties are diminishing before our very eyes, the same Trump who admires and supports our enemies and undermines and condemns our allies, the same Trump who stole our national secrets, the same erratic, unstable who cares for no one but himself, who fundamentally lacks compassion, judgment or human decency.

That man. With his finger on the button. That man. Four minutes away from launching the most unspeakable, unimaginable horror the world has ever known.

His defenders might say that because he is friends with a man like Putin that reduces the risk of nuclear conflict. That is dangerous nonsense. First, Putin is no one’s friend and his goal is the destruction of the U.S. Next, Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine and against American allies. How does that jibe with Trump’s line that under his presidency Putin could do whatever the Hell he wanted with Europe? Do you think that Trump’s intention of handing Ukraine over to Putin will actually reduce the risk of further conflict in Europe or it will embolden Putin? How will Trump’s stated desire to pull out of NATO impact that? History has shown that appeasers like Trump are precisely the ones who tempt aggressors into actions that lead to wars. How long would it be before a war between Putin and our European allies turned nuclear? How will China react if the U.S. withdraws its support for Ukraine and effectively hands it over to Russia? Will they be tempted to make a move against Taiwan? A China that is in the midst of the largest nuclear weapons modernization and expansion program since the depths of the Cold War? Do you remember that Trump was the guy that pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal resulting in Iran now being closer than ever to building a nuclear weapon? How do you think a Trump-enabled Bibi Netanyahu, the head of the nuclear state of Israel, would react to a near nuclear or newly nuclear Iran?

Electing Trump would put an unstable man with a terrible track record on both nuclear weapons and national security with his finger on the button as of next January 20. That’s three months from now. That’s not the impossible future. It’s not an impossible sequence of events.

Nuclear horror is not something that history has forever consigned to the past. It is a horrific reality that looms just minutes away from our lives and one that will grow more imminent, more likely to be visited on us all, if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States again.

The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are the members of Nihon Hidankyo have devoted their lives to ensuring that the suffering they endured is never again visited upon the people of this planet. They deserve the honor they receive today. But that honor will turn to dust if the people of the United States ignore their message, ignore the lessons of their lives and ours, and put a man as dangerous and unfit for the presidency as Donald Trump in charge of our planet’s nuclear destiny.