[This piece has been updated and adapted from William D. Hartung’s ‘Nuclear Politics’ in Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, edited by Helen Caldicott and just published by the New Press.] Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war. Such dangers seemed like Cold War relics, associated with outmoded practices like building fallout shelters and ‘duck and cover’ drills.
But give Donald Trump credit. When it comes to nukes, he’s gotten our attention. He’s prompted renewed concern, if not outright alarm, about the possibility that such weaponry could actually be used for the first time since the 6th and 9th of August 1945. That’s what happens when the man in the Oval Office begins threatening to rain ‘fire and fury like the world has never seen’ on another country or, as he did in his presidential campaign, claimingcryptically that, when it comes to nuclear weapons, ‘the devastation is very important to me.’
Trump’s pronouncements are at least as unnerving as President Ronald Reagan’s infamous ‘joke’ that ‘we begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes’ or the comment of a Reagan aide that, ‘with enough shovels,’ the United States could survive a superpower nuclear exchange.
Whether in the 1980s or today, a tough-guy attitude on nuclear weapons, when combined with an apparent ignorance about their world-ending potential, adds up to a toxic brew. An unprecedented global anti-nuclear movement — spearheaded by the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign and, in the United States, the Nuclear Freeze campaign — helped turn President Reagan around, so much so that he later agreed to substantial nuclear cuts and acknowledged that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Nov 29, 2017.
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