Pete Hegseth Could End Our Species

Distraction is Donald Trump’s modus operandi, perhaps second only to delusion. We are now mired in a frenetic national conversation about whether we should acquire Greenland, retake the Panama Canal, and make Canada our fifty-first state.

So We, The People—not to mention our so-called “mainstream media”—appear to have entirely forgotten that Pete Hegseth is up for Senate confirmation as Secdef on Tuesday, just three days away.

So far, the “conversation” about his appointment has focused on his several personal indiscretions, including incidents of flagrant public drunkenness, dismissive attitude toward females, and alleged sexual assaults. These credible allegations of raunchy personal misbehavior are bad enough. Do we really want a man with the discipline and self-control of a pot-headed teenager with his finger on The Button?

But the gossip about Hegseth’s personal faults have totally obscured a far more critical issue in his nomination: his inexperience and ignorance of strategic plans and risks. The highest military rank Hegseth has ever held is that of Major. And he reportedly held it in the Minnesota National Guard for less than a year, training Afghan security forces.

He has never held the rank of general, not even a one-star, and he never had any involvement with, let alone command of, our nation’s strategic forces. In other words, when it comes to our “strategic triad” of nuclear forces—missiles, missile-bearing submarines, and strategic “stealth” bombers—he has about as much experience and knowledge as the average man or woman in the street.

To understand how consequential that inexperience could be, let’s turn to the patron saint of the modern Republican Party, President Ronald Reagan. He had undeniable Irish charm and a way of speaking that beguiled an entire nation. But even as president, he, too, was an utter ingenue regarding the strategic forces, both ours and our adversaries’, that could extinguish our species.

More than that: Reagan was apparently incurious on the subject. It wasn’t until his second term as president that he asked his generals what would be the consequences of a general nuclear exchange. They told him that an estimated 600 million people would die, on all sides, in the exchange and immediate aftermath of the conflict. That was more than double our national population at the time.

With that basic factual information, Reagan turned his attention and legendary charm to a critical problem: avoiding Armageddon. He found a willing partner in Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform- and peace-minded Soviet leader at the time. The rest is history. Virtually all the international agreements regulating the insanity of the nuclear arms race, most of which have now expired or are soon to expire, had their origins in the species-protective mutual understanding of Reagan and Gorbachev in the 1980s.

Now those agreements are gone or expiring. The entire notion of rational choice to reduce the risk of Armageddon is on the ropes.

In his personal resurrection of nineteenth-century imperialism in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has threatened using nuclear weapons multiple times. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has done the same, and Trump, in his first term, returned the favor by threatening “fire and fury.” Even China, which was never a factor in the nuclear strategic calculus when Reagan was president, now has an estimated arsenal of 500-600 nukes and is reportedly building it out to multiple world-destroying capacity, just like our own arsenal and the Russians’.

The simple fact is that an exploding a tiny fraction of the strategic nuclear arsenal of a single major power—even India or Pakistan—would likely end human life on Earth as we know it. It could do so in two ways.

The first is a so-called “nuclear winter.” Some twenty or so big, roughly simultaneous nuclear explosions could kick up dust and debris high into the stratosphere and so produce a “nuclear winter.” Notwithstanding the current, much slower acceleration of global warming, the resulting massive and sudden blockage of the Sun could destroy human agriculture worldwide, for a number of years, leading to a planet-wide catastrophic famine.

The issue is not a matter of mere temperature, unlike the relatively slow pace of climate change that, even now, is multiplying weather disasters like the recent hurricane destruction of Asheville, North Carolina, or the wind-driven and drought-fed wildfires in Los Angeles. No, the “nuclear winter” would be a much simpler and more direct matter: blocking the Sun’s rays from hitting the Earth’s surface. Those rays are vital for photosynthesis in crops, and crops feed both us and the animals we eat.

With no Sun for several years (until the dust settles), there will be no food, except the leftovers from whatever has been stored. Our species has already experienced similar dust-driven famines, for example, in the medieval “Little Ice Age” thought to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions.

The second method of likely species extinction would be radioactivity. How quickly we forget! In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union, both nations tested nuclear weapons (both fission and thermonuclear, i.e., “hydrogen bombs”) on a regular basis. As a result of this “drip, drip, drip” of atmospheric nuclear testing—just a few weapons per year on each side—radioactive isotopes such as strontium-90 began to circulate in the upper atmosphere, span the globe, and settle down to where people live. The isotopes began to appear in cows’ milk that people drank and to cause unusual cancers in children and others who drank the milk.

In those days, with the world’s most terrible war (and the first use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in recent memory, our species’ leaders were a bit more circumspect. After the near-catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, JFK and then Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev got together, relying on accurate and terrifying scientific information, and adopted the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, banning tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, on the Earth’s surface, and under water. That Treaty still stands today.

But the “drip, drip, drip” of radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing was nothing like what a full wartime nuclear exchange could produce. At the height of the nuclear testing binge, in which nations besides the US and Soviet Union participated, the number of nukes exploded were at most a dozen or so per year. Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that humanity has some 13 thousand nuclear weapons worldwide, possessed by such nations as ours, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel. If only one or two of these nations start throwing their nukes around in a frenzy of fear or anger, the surface of our Earth could become a radioactive wasteland in just a few months.

Merely to understand these dismal realities, a leader must have a solid grasp of the science of nuclear weapons, the dynamics of radioactivity dispersal and “nuclear winter,” and their many smaller-scale disastrous effects if used. He/she must also have in mind the vast and multifarious forces around the globe that possess nukes, and the details of their command, control and possible use (by mistake or otherwise) in multiple cultures, nations, regions and commands.

Donald Trump does not possess this knowledge and expertise and never will. He’s even more incurious than Ronald Reagan, if only because the beginning and end of his curiosity is himself.

So our protection against stumbling into a nuclear war because of miscalculation, misunderstanding, misperception, bravado, or sheer stupidity depends on our second in command in these matters: our Secdef.

Yes, we have a long tradition of civilian control of our military. But having a Secdef with inadequate military experience has not served us well. In the Vietnam era, we had Robert S. MacNamara—a car-maker at Ford by trade and training—who brought us the longest, most tragic, bitterly divisive military debacle in our history. More recently, in Iraq, we had Donald Rumsfeld, who brought us the long, bitter, and agonizingly slow stalemate in Iraq.

In assessing the risk of nuclear Armageddon, we can’t afford to take that sort of risk again, when a single misstep could be our entire species’ last.

Pete Hegseth is not just a miserable excuse for a man and a leader. Far more important, he has not a whit of the experience, expertise, knowledge and curiosity that we need for humanity to survive the present and coming challenges of planetary heating and our Second Age of Imperialism intact. He is a mediocre, uneducated, incurious, untutored man who reached his Peter Principle long ago, at Fox.

Hegseth is self-evidently the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time and the wrong place. His confirmation as a sycophant and yes-man to reinforce President-elect Trump’s worst impulses could facilitate our species’ own self-extinction. He must not be confirmed.


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