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 warNo 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.
In the first two years alone, three-quarters of humanity—6 billion people—would die.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Dr. 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.
Dr. Bandy 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.