How Trump Threatens Our Species’ Survival

DISCLAIMER: This post is not based on “inside information.” I am not privy to the state secrets of any nation, including our own. Therefore, I’m revealing no classified information here.

Every step in this reasoning is based on publicly available information, logical deduction from it, and my knowledge, experience and intuition derived from my first career as a scientist/engineer with a Ph.D. in physics (UC San Diego, 1971), plus a lifetime of thinking about physical and human cause and effect. If you wish to treat these conclusions as “informed speculation” or even “sheer speculation,” that is your privilege. But at least take them seriously.

The ultimate foundation of human morality and civilization is personal responsibility. At the end of the day, what keeps people’s behavior within moral and legal bounds is the practical consequences of bad acts. That means real penalties for wrongdoing that actually hurt (or extinguish the wrongdoer).

In this regard, one of the most important events in human history was the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Those trials brought to justice the aggressors in our species’ most horrible war (so far) and the perpetrators of the Holocaust. It took a worldwide catastrophe and the most-deadly-ever genocide to motivate those trials, but the outcome was execution of the chief villains and long prison terms for their underlings.

In the years since World War II, our species developed a number of institutions designed to promote individual responsibility for general wrongdoing, including so-called “crimes against humanity.” They include the United Nations, the International Court of Justice at the Hague, and the International Criminal Court. Tellingly, the US and Russia both failed to subscribe to the International Criminal Court. Yet both together possess the overwhelming majority of our species’ nuclear weapons, as well as the most sophisticated ways of delivering them.

It gets worse, much worse. At this moment in history, four individual leaders have practical control over nuclear weapons with little or no effective means to insure their personal accountability to our species, or, if the truth be told, to anyone. Their names, in alphabetical order of surnames, are: Kim Jong-Un, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump.

I exclude other leaders of nuclear powers for two reasons. First and most important, none of the others has threatened to use nuclear weapons or made or threatened war in the recent past. Second, all the others seem effectively restrained by workable democracies, powerful and reasonable allies, and/or publicized policies limiting nuclear weapons to deterrence and perhaps a last-resort nuclear counter-strike. In the case of China, Xi Jinping, to my knowledge, has never threatened first use, even (especially) with respect to Taiwan. On the contrary, he has repeatedly emphasized deterrence.

Each of the four individual leaders appears to have the power to order the use of nuclear weapons unilaterally. Kim and Putin are absolute despots, and both already have ordered conventional attacks on neighbors that have caused damage, real in the case of South Korea, and catastrophic in the case of Ukraine. Although Netanyahu and Trump are leaders of ostensible democracies, the former has shown the practical power to make and prolong a devastating war in Gaza, and Trump has sole control over the “Football” used to launch nuclear weapons, ostensibly for quick response in the event of an attack.

Science tells us that a general exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and Russia likely would cause a “nuclear winter” that could extinguish most higher life forms on Earth, leaving the future of our planet to deep-sea creatures, cockroaches, and microbes. So our own president is one of a handful of individuals who have the practical power to start a nuclear war that could, in essence, extinguish our species. All four, in one way or another, have threatened their use, explicitly or implicitly.

What, if anything, restrains the Big Four nuke brandishers? In the case of Kim, his country is small and compact. A quiet, nuclear submarine hiding off his coast could launch a small nuke to obliterate his headquarters, but not his people, within less than ten minutes of receiving an order. The case of Netanyahu is different, because none of his nation’s nearby enemies has nuclear weapons. He could, for example, obliterate Tehran, Qom, and/or Riyadh in that proverbial ten minutes with no immediate retaliation beyond conventional weapons.

Unfortunately, nothing much restrains Putin or Trump but their nations’ own internal politics and their own, personal, individual calculations of retaliation and other consequences. In other words, insofar as they are concerned, the future of our species lies in their hands and heads.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some individual consequence of a catastrophic decision that might extinguish our species, other than the decider dying himself while also extinguishing the rest of us? In that regard, there may be some hope. At least we might have something to restrain Putin, if Trump doesn’t give it away.

Enter stealth technology. It’s not a single thing. It’s a whole complex of matter, means and methods, including particular materials, special coatings, geometric configurations, and modes of use of aircraft and missiles. This technology reportedly allows them to escape detection by known, conventional means, such as radar, until they reach their targets. Using stealth technology, an American fighter or bomber, or an American missile, could deliver a small nuke to the Kremlin, or to Putin’s palace in Sochi, wiping it and him off the face of the Earth but leaving Moscow (or the rest of it) and the rest of Russia intact. And it could do this “stealthily,” presumably in a surprise attack that would prevent Putin and other target leaders from escaping.

If that happened, what would the surviving Russian military do? Would they launch an all-out nuclear response, thereby ensuring the extinction of our species, including themselves? More likely, they would try to do something similar to us, i.e., to wipe out the White House and Congress without harming much else.

Conventional wisdom is that, lacking our stealth technology, they don’t have effective means to do so. But they could launch missiles with small nukes from nearby subs hiding off the Atlantic coast. If they launched enough from enough different subsea locations, one might get through.

As this account suggests, the balance of nuclear terror is now granular. Not only do the US and Russia each have the power to extinguish our species. They also appear to have the more limited power to wipe out each other’s centers of national power, including its leaders, in a surprise attack that prevents the leaders’ timely removal. In other words, “decapitation” with small nuclear weapons is a real possibility.

With its secret stealth technology, the US has a bit of an upper hand. Stealth technology gives it the ability, at least in theory, to attack with small nukes from the sea, from the air, and perhaps even from land (for example, from bases in Europe). This advantage—to the extent understood by the Russians—gives us leverage to keep Putin “honest,” but not our own leader. (The same advantage may apply with respect to China, but China’s science and technology appears, in general, far superior to Russia’s. And recall the great Russian embarrassment in 1987, when a German teenager named Matthew Rust flew a Cessna, without permission, right into Red Square.)

So now, at last, we can get to the point of this essay. In his recent sycophancy to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”) of Saudi Arabia, Trump promised to deliver our most advanced jet fighters, F-35s, which reportedly contain and embody our most advanced stealth technology. Up to now, we have provided these fighters only to our closest allies, and only under conditions of strict military secrecy.

Saudi Arabia is an “ally” in name only. It’s a monarchy and for all practical purposes a tyranny and dictatorship, with no guarantee of secrecy but MBS’ word. If he changes his mind or just gets careless, all our secret stealth technology embodied in the F-35 could fall into our rivals’ hands. And you can bet that both Russia and China will use every trick of the trade, fair and foul, to acquire one of those planes—or merely to examine and dissect it, secretly in a closed hangar—while in the Saudis’ hands. Imagine what payments or concessions they might make MBS for that short-term privilege!

If China, let alone Russia, thus acquires our stealth technology, the loss will not only cripple our fast-waning military-technological supremacy. It will also heighten the risk of Russia (probably not China) using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, for example in Ukraine. (What do you think made Putin stop threatening to use tactical nukes on Ukrainian battlefields, as he did repeatedly during the early stages of his vicious aggression? Could it have been expressed or implied threats to take him out personally with small nukes if he did so?)

By transgressing the “nuclear taboo,” Putin’s use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine would substantially increase the likelihood of a significant nuclear exchange, if not species self-extinction. And Putin’s ability to “steal” our secret stealth technology from or through Saudi Arabia would significantly decrease our deterrence, thereby making such tactical use more likely.

This is what happens when a great democracy chooses as supreme leader a man who is stupid, ignorant, thoughtless, capricious and self-obsessed, and who ignores the law, national precedent, and strategic concerns with potentially catastrophic consequences in pursuit of short-term national and personal gain. Isn’t it past time to start thinking seriously about impeachment and/or Amendment 25?


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