The most chilling concern about Donald Trump is the worldwide fear that he puts our very survival at risk. This is not loose talk or partisanship. It was recently expressed by the most thoughtful experts who monitor the risks to our survival: the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who are the keepers of the Doomsday Clock.1
On January 26, 2017, just a week after Donald Trump was sworn into office as the new president of the United States, the scientists who orchestrated the clock announced that the world was “Two and a half minutes to midnight,” where midnight signifies the end of civilization. They cited Trump’s “ill-considered comments about expanding and even deploying the American nuclear arsenal” as well as his “expressed disbelief in the scientific consensus on global warming.” A year later, in January 2018, the group inched the clock forward another thirty seconds, just two minutes to midnight—to global catastrophe. This is the closest it has been to midnight since 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union first exploded the new thermonuclear weapons, powerful enough to end all human life on the planet.
As we see in the timeline in figure 8.1, we are now as close to doom as we were in 1953, when both the United States and Russia first possessed thermonuclear weapons capable of destroying the world. “To call the world’s nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger and its immediacy,” the Bulletin said.
FIGURE 8.1 The Doomsday Clock
Note: Minutes to midnight, 1947–2017
The Doomsday Clock was created seventy years ago, in the early days of the Cold War and the nuclear weapons race between the United States and the Soviet Union. For the first time in human history, mankind possessed the means of causing not only great carnage and suffering, but also the very destruction of humanity. The early generation of atomic scientists recognized the profound and unprecedented dangers of the new weapons and sought to warn the world. In the first edition of the clock, in 1947, they set the time to seven minutes before midnight, nuclear Armageddon. As the Cold War intensified, and atomic bombs gave way to vastly more powerful thermonuclear bombs, the minute hand moved five minutes closer to midnight.
When President Kennedy came into office, in his inaugural address he powerfully expressed the existential paradox of modernity: “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” We never came closer to the end than in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when mistakes by both the United States and the Soviet Union led the world to the very brink of nuclear war. Many of the military advisers on Kennedy’s Executive Committee would have led us into thermonuclear war. The Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, with their cool heads and profound sense of responsibility, saved us despite their advisers, not because of them. We should all shudder when contemplating an Executive Committee meeting in our time.
Then in 1963, brilliant diplomacy by Kennedy, supported by the moral leadership of Pope John XXIII and the bold statesmanship of Nikita Khrushchev, led to the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Humanity was spared (possibly at great personal cost—some think that right-wingers took such offense to JFK’s peace initiative that the president was assassinated as a result; there is real plausibility to that view). The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock moved back to twelve minutes before midnight, a margin of safety.
With America’s escalation of the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson, the minute hand began to move once again toward midnight, while Richard Nixon’s détente with the Soviet Union again reduced tensions and put the minute hand back to twelve minutes before midnight. Then tensions escalated with Ronald Reagan’s new arms buildup, until Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika, culminating in the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Humanity had, it seemed, reached a moment of relative safety; the minute hand stood that year at seventeen minutes before midnight.
Yet if ever a historic opportunity for safety was squandered, this was it. Every U.S. president since then—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—has contributed to a decline of global safety, with the minute hand moving from seventeen minutes before midnight to just three minutes before midnight last year, even before Donald Trump became president. And after just a few days in office came another thirty-second jump of the minute hand toward midnight.
What went wrong between 1991 and now? Two grave mistakes were made. The first was the failure to capitalize on the end of the Cold War by establishing a trustworthy relationship between the United States and Russia, as detailed in chapter 5. The second mistake was to turn a blind eye to the second existential threat: human-induced global warming. While the danger of nuclear weapons was easy enough to perceive (though also easy to forget day to day), the existential threat from human-induced climate change was far more difficult. To understand it requires at least a basic awareness of quantum physics, the Earth’s physical dynamics, and Earth’s climate and economic history. Our presidents and Congress have lacked that. They understand money from lobbyists—oil and gas companies—not quantum physics.
There are dire risks associated with our continued burning of coal, oil, and gas. When these fossil fuels are burned, they emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has the special quantum-mechanical property that it absorbs infrared radiation and thereby acts as a kind of atmospheric “greenhouse” for Earth, causing the planet to warm. This is of course clear to atmospheric chemists, but not to most politicians. The science and Earth history also make clear that we are recklessly gambling with future survival. The ocean level could rise by twenty feet or more as a result of even slight further increases in temperature. Only a fool would say that because such an outcome is not completely certain, we should simply continue to burn fossil fuels at the maximum rate.
The Bulletin made clear that the failure to act on climate change was a major reason for moving the Doomsday Clock forward in 2017, noting that Trump’s “nominees to head the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science.” In 2018, moving the minute hand another thirty seconds toward midnight, they wrote: “The nations of the world will have to significantly decrease their greenhouse gas emissions to keep climate risks manageable, and so far, the global response has fallen far short of meeting this challenge.”2
Trump and his cabinet are in denial. Trump has completely turned his administration’s environmental policies over to the oil and gas industry. The State Department is now in the hands of ExxonMobil; the Environmental Protection Agency is in the hands of politicians like Scott Pruitt, long financed by the fossil-fuel industry. The word on Capitol Hill is simple: The mega-billionaire Koch brothers, who own the nation’s largest private fossil-fuel company, own Congress, or at least the Republican side.
When it comes to nuclear weapons, the issue is not denial but inconsistency. Trump has casually suggested that Japan and Korea should become nuclear powers; that a new nuclear-arms race is welcome; and that the use of nuclear weapons (e.g., in regard to ISIS) is not “off the table.” Yet, for every statement such as these, there are equal and opposite statements as well. There is, in short, casualness, inconsistency, and incoherence.
Trump is impetuous, unstable, and inexperienced. His foreign policies swing wildly from day to day. He makes threats, such as attacking North Korea or conflict with Iran, that could have horrific, indeed catastrophic, consequences. American arrogance and President Donald Trump’s delusional worldview have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Before it is too late, American citizens must make overwhelmingly clear that we do not want millions of Americans or others to perish in a reckless attempt by the Trump administration to overthrow the North Korean or Iranian regime or denuclearize North Korea by force.
We would rather accept a nuclear-armed North Korea that is deterred by America’s overwhelming threat of force than risk a U.S.-led war of choice, one that would almost surely involve nuclear weapons. Yet in 2017, then-National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster explicitly said that Trump rejects “accept and deter.” The dangers are exceedingly high.
“Accept and deter” would not be appeasement. Though negotiations and sanctions could conceivably induce the North to relinquish its nuclear weapons, the odds remain low and North Korea’s nuclear weapons are likely to remain for many years to come. “Accept and deter” is therefore likely to be the moral and practical requirement of survival. Appeasement would be the case if North Korea were demanding the surrender of the United States or South Korea, but that’s not the case. North Korea argues that it needs nuclear arms to protect the regime from the threat of a U.S. attack. According to North Korea, it seeks a “military equilibrium,” not a surrender of the United States or South Korea.
Sad to say, North Korea’s fears of a U.S.-led overthrow are realistic from North Korea’s perspective. Creating the conditions for North Korea’s eventual denuclearization would require trust-building over many years of patient diplomacy and interaction, including U.S. diplomatic recognition of North Korea.
The United States faces a trap of its own making. For decades, this country has forcibly overthrown regimes it deemed hostile to U.S. interests. North Korea fears that it is next.
Wars can happen accidentally, especially in situations like this, when there is so much mistrust, misunderstanding, and inflexible posturing.
Recently, three regimes that ended their nuclear programs were subsequently attacked by nuclear powers. Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program came to an end after the first Gulf War, in 1990; Saddam was overthrown by the United States in 2003. Moammar Khadafy ended his nuclear program in December 2003 and was overthrown by U.S.-backed forces in 2011. Ukraine surrendered its nuclear forces in 1994 in return for security guarantees, but was subsequently attacked by Russia in 2014.
Since the early 1990s, North Korea has repeatedly demanded security guarantees from the United States—including diplomatic recognition, economic measures, and other steps—in exchange for ending its drive toward a nuclear arsenal. Several agreements were in fact reached on the idea of guaranteeing North Korean security in return for denuclearization, yet all of the agreements subsequently collapsed. A very insightful and balanced account of these failed attempts is provided in a Brookings Institution report by a senior Chinese foreign policy expert, Fu Ying, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress of China.
Mutual distrust is the basic reason for repeated failures. The United States again and again dragged its feet on granting diplomatic recognition and economic assistance to North Korea, despite explicit promises to do so. North Korea, for its part, violated the spirit if not the letter of the agreements, using covert means at times to skirt agreed nuclear safeguards. Both sides have been trapped in the security dilemma, in which defensive actions by one are seen as offensive by the other. The result is a terrifying arms race and downward spiral toward nuclear war.
In this tit-for-tat pattern, it is difficult if not impossible to identify who has broken the various accords first. The bottom line is that there is no security agreement for North Korea, and no long-term suspension or abandonment by North Korea of its nuclear program. Now Trump’s temperamental instability could trigger a nuclear war through the belief adopted by either side that the other is about to launch a devastating preemptive attack. Add to this the human element—errors such as the mistaken alert of a ballistic missile headed for Hawaii in January 2018—and we see again how terrifying prospects that may seem unreal, even preposterous, are utterly possible if we aren’t judicious, cautious, and wise. Unfortunately, Trump is the very opposite: rash, impulsive, and ignorant.
The Trump administration has threatened North Korea with war if it fails to denuclearize. Even as Trump has turned from threats to negotiations, there may well be senior U.S. security advisers who believe in the possibility of a quick “decapitation” of the North Korean regime before its nuclear weapons are unleashed. Some advisers may believe that America’s antimissile systems would protect the United States and its allies in the event that North Korea launched its nuclear weapons.
In my view, any confidence in a military solution is reckless and immoral. Most expert assessments suggest massive deaths in South Korea, perhaps 20,000 per day, from a conventional war, much less a nuclear war. Most experts believe that the antimissile systems are highly imperfect, with a real possibility of failure.
If there is one lesson of history, it is to doubt the boastful pronouncements of warmongers. Things go wrong. One’s own weapons systems frequently fail. Treachery, surprise, accidents, errors are the essence of war. And with nuclear war, one doesn’t get a second chance. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s reckless generals urged a military attack, believing that a nuclear war could be avoided. The truth was that Russian and Cuban troops were already deployed to use battlefield nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional U.S. attack.
Perhaps the most important lesson that came out of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the conclusion of President Kennedy in his famous “Peace Speech” of June 1963, which ushered in the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty:
Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.3
Amen.
Let’s not panic. Instead, let’s think, plan, and act. To quote Kennedy once more: “Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man.” The problem of Donald Trump can be solved too, by the institutions of American democracy and the international rule of law.
Trump is a bully whose bluster is designed to intimidate and wrong-foot a foe, and in Trump’s worldview, just about everybody is a foe. As he has famously explained, in an attitude inherited from his father, there are “killers” and there are “losers.” The bluster is designed to put Killer Trump ahead of the losers. The key to survival in the Trump era is to look past the bluster, face down the bullying, and prevent Trump’s poorly controlled emotions from guiding the policies of the United States on these life-and-death issues.
The turn from name-calling to negotiation with North Korea gives some reason for hope, but it is all too easy to see how the spectacle of summits could slide back into acrimony, vitriol, and threats. The US demands denuclearization; North Korea demands security, and there is as yet no evidence that the reciprocal demands have been reconciled. With Trump’s instability and lack of attention span, anything can happen.
Trump’s impulsiveness will need to be checked. This check will come in part from our courts, which must scrutinize the various poorly prepared and ill-considered executive orders that have come from the administration; many will be quashed. Regulatory agencies must also follow rigorous procedures to change existing regulations, all of which are subject to court review and congressional supervision. Another check could come if a few patriotic Republican senators join with the Democrats to put a stop to Trump’s mad rush of recklessness. Will Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Lisa Murkowski, or Ron Paul, among others, really stand by if Trump brings us to the brink of nuclear war?
Other checks will come from outside our borders. Trump is rapidly uniting the world—against the United States. Within just two weeks of taking office, Trump had the European Union president listing the Trump administration alongside Russia, China, and the Middle East as threats to the European Union. China’s president Xi Jinping has offered to take up the internationalist mantle that Trump is so eager to relinquish. Almost all of the world is also united in urging the handful of nuclear-weapons countries to honor their solemn obligations, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to take concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament, and not to instigate a renewed and dangerous arms race.
Finally, of course, there is electoral politics. In moments of pessimism, it may seem that Trump will trample American democracy, thereby preventing a course correction in 2020 or earlier. Yet Trump is no Caesar or Augustus, and the United States is no republican Rome on the verge of succumbing to dictatorship. No doubt Trump can do great damage; our institutional checks and balances have been gravely weakened by decades of rule by the military-industrial-intelligence complex. Presidents indeed have the power to launch wars, even secret ones run by the CIA and special ops units that can kill vast numbers of innocents. But it’s my sincere hope that the American people, and our political institutions, are not ready to accede to bullies.
The United States has developed a level of wealth, productivity, and technological know-how utterly unimaginable in the past. Yet we put everything at risk through our wanton addiction to war. If we instead used our vast knowledge, economic might, and technological excellence to help cure diseases, end poverty, protect the environment, and ensure global food security, America would profoundly inspire other nations and do much to secure a new era of global peace.
Checks on Trump’s recklessness and warmongering cannot come soon enough; as we’ll see in the next chapter, his emerging ideas about national security and nuclear weapons are a danger to us all.
