Trump is the real nuclear threat, and we can’t just fantasise him away - Jonathan Freedland
Among the many
terrifying facts that have emerged in the last several days, perhaps the
scariest relate to the nuclear button over which now hovers the finger of Donald Trump. It
turns out that, of all the powers held by this or any other US president, the
least checked or balanced is his authority over the world’s mightiest arsenal.
He exercises this awesome, civilisation-ending power alone.
As Trump has learned
in recent months, the man in the Oval Office cannot simply issue a decree
changing, say, the US healthcare system. He has to build majorities in the
House and Senate, which is harder than it looks. If he wants to change immigration policy, a
mere order is not enough. He can be stopped by the courts, as Trump saw with
his travel ban. But if he wants to rain fire and fury on a distant
enemy, bringing more fire and fury down on his own citizens and many hundreds
of millions of others, there is no one standing in his way. Not for nothing
does the geopolitical literature refer to the US president as the “nuclear monarch.”
The more you hear of
the simplicity of the system, the more frightening it becomes. If Trump decides
he has had enough of Kim Jong-un’s verbal threats, he merely has to turn to the
low-level military aide at his side and ask them to open up the black
briefcase that officer keeps permanently in their grasp. The bag is known
as the nuclear “football”. (It gets its name from the code word for the very
first set of nuclear war plans: dropkick.) Inside the bag is a menu of
options, explained in detail in a “black book,” but also set out in a single,
cartoon-like page for speedy comprehension. Trump has only to make his choice,
pick up the phone to the Pentagon war room, utter the code words that identify
him as the president and give the order. That’s it.
There is no need for
consultation with anyone else. Not the secretary of state or the secretary of
defence, nor the head of the military. The officer who receives the call at the
Pentagon has no authority to question or challenge the order. His or her duty
is only to implement it. Thirty minutes after the president gave the
instruction, the nuclear missiles would be hitting their targets. There is no
way of turning them back. Such power in the hands of a single individual
would be a horrifying prospect even if it were Solomon himself whose finger was
on the trigger. But as Bruce Blair, a former nuclear missile launch
officer, and seasoned military analyst wrote during the 2016 campaign, Trump’s “quick temper,
defensiveness bordering on paranoia and disdain for anyone who criticises him
do not inspire deep confidence in his prudence.”
What’s more, Trump is
the man who said in 2015, “For me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation
is very important to me,” and who bellowed from the campaign podium, “I love
war”. In last year’s election campaign, the former Republican congressman Joe
Scarborough reported on a briefing a foreign policy expert had given Trump.
“Three times, he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, we can’t we use
them?’ … Three times, in an hour briefing, ‘Why can’t we use nuclear
weapons?’”
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