Scary to think what Trump might do, especially if he loses the midterms
Dr. Ira
Helfand and Dr. Bandy X.
Lee in Common
Dreams
 |
In an AI-generated image that he posted on his Truth
Social account on May 17, 2026, Trump presses the
red nuclear button. Photo from Trump's Truth Social. |
Over the last few months, the president of the United States has
been posting
an image of himself firing nuclear weapons at
Earth from a spaceship. How worried should we be?
Right now, a handful of people in nine countries have the
power to launch a nuclear
war that will kill billions and destroy human civilization. In the United
States that power is concentrated in one person, the president, who has sole
and unchecked authority to launch nuclear war.
No one should ever have that power, but the danger is
especially acute when the individual in question has repeatedly demonstrated
that he is impulsive, vindictive, delusional, and profoundly lacking in basic
human empathy. We are speaking of Donald Trump.
The nuclear arsenal Trump currently controls
includes some 1,700 deployed nuclear warheads, most of them with an explosive
force of 100 to 800 kilotons, six to 50 times more powerful than the bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima.
If used in a large-scale attack on Russia, they could kill more than 100
million people in the first afternoon. And a Russian counterattack would kill
at least that many here in the United States.
Those who survived the initial fires and explosions would
find themselves living in a wasteland that we cannot imagine. None of the
things we need to keep ourselves alive would be available. There would be no
electric grid, no cell phones, no internet, no food distribution system, no
system for distributing gasoline or natural gas or heating oil, no law and order.
And in
the months following the initial attacks most of those who survived those
attacks would also die—from starvation, epidemic
disease, radiation sickness, and exposure to the elements.
The disaster
would not be confined to the US and Russia. The smoke from
burning cities in both countries would loft enormous quantities of smoke into
the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and dropping temperatures across the
planet an average of 18°F. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia
temperatures would drop 45-50°F, food production would plummet, and the vast
majority of the human race would starve.
In the first two years alone,
three-quarters of humanity—6 billion people—would die.
Impulsivity
Trump has bragged that he makes decisions based on his “gut
instinct.” In a 2018 interview he defended style of decision-making by claiming, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes
than anybody’s brain can ever tell me.”
The consequences have played out
disastrously in the Iran War, where his initial decision to launch the attack
on Iran appeared to lack any coherent goals, any plan to achieve those goals,
or any back up plan if things went wrong and, for example, the Iranians closed
the Strait of Hormuz.
Vindictiveness
Trump’s explosive personal attacks on journalists who
question him are well known, as are his repeated attempts to use the Department of
Justice to imprison people who disagree with him publicly.
More worrisome
are his thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons against Iran when it refused his demand
for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
Delusional State
Given the unprecedented torrent of false statements that
Trump has made, it is sometimes difficult to know when he is willfully lying
and when he actually believes the misinformation he is spreading.
But it does
appear that he actually believes that he won the 2020 presidential election,
despite the irrefutable evidence that he did not. And he has engaged in
sustained political activity grounded in this delusion.
Lack of Empathy
Trump’s nasty, ad hominem attacks, usually accompanied by a
crude nickname for the target of his displeasure, are a staple of his public
life.
His indifference to human suffering, and his disregard for human life, is
exemplified by the extralegal executions of people on boats that he claims may
be transporting drugs, and, on a far grander scale, by his support for the war crimes being
committed in Gaza, and his
indifference to the even greater crimes being committed in Sudan, and the Democratic
Republic of Congo.
There are no “right hands” to be in possession of nuclear
weapons. But Donald
Trump clearly possesses utterly “wrong hands” and should be lawfully
removed from an office that gives him the power to destroy humanity. And the
United States should actively work for the elimination of all nuclear weapons,
not as a distant vision, but an urgent national security priority.
Ira
Helfand is a past president of Physicians for Social
Responsibility and serves as the co-president of the group's global federation,
the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
Bandy
X. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist and a
world expert on violence who taught at Yale Law School for 17 years while on
the faculty of Yale School of Medicine, before joining the Harvard Medical
School faculty, where she remained until 2024. She is currently devoting her
time to a number of policy-oriented think tanks, both domestically and abroad.
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