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nuclear war
Trump, Faced With Global Armageddon, Does Everything He Can to Bring It On
From opening 1.3 billion acres of coastline to oil and gas drilling to promising to resume nuclear testing, Trump invites us to pick our own apocalypse.
Dec 11, 2025
What self-destructive creatures we turn out to be!
Can you even believe it? Only recently, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, met in Brazil for two weeks. While 194 countries were represented there, the historically greatest fossil-fuelizer on the planet, Donald Trump’s United States, was, of course, missing in action (for the first time in 30 years). Worse yet, while the conference was underway, the Trump administration announced a new plan to open 1.3 billion acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling. As for the conference itself, after floundering and almost foundering, its member nations barely agreed on a way more or less forward, what were termed “baby steps” toward a better (or at least less utterly disastrous) future. And yet, can you believe this? The final agreement didn’t even include the words “fossil fuels” or reaffirm in blunt language that they should be phased out! (President Donald Trump must have been pleased!)
Hey, and if that doesn’t cheer you up enough, consider this: A White House spokeswoman responded to the conference with the claim that President Trump had “set a strong example for the rest of the world” by pursuing new fossil fuel development while it was underway. “President Trump has been clear,” she said. “He will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”
Yes, indeed, what a world! After all, we’re talking about one of the two ways human beings have discovered to utterly devastate Planet Earth (the other, of course, being with nuclear weapons). And full credit is due. Consider us nothing less than remarkable creatures for coming up with not one but two ways to potentially do ourselves and this planet in.
A child born today is, in truth, being delivered into the slow-motion climate equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for such a kid, there’s unlikely to be any ducking and covering.
Now, imagine this: “My” president, the man, inaugurated for a second time in January 2025, was the oldest nominee ever for that office and, should he complete this term, will be the oldest president in American history, older even than ancient Joe Biden when he left office (assuming, of course, that Donald Trump ever does leave office). And give him full credit: He’s essentially put his weight—and that’s no small thing, given that he’s been termed “technically obese,” even if his administration has been denying obese immigrants entry to this country—behind both ways of doing this planet in. After all, he only recently announced that, for the first time since 1992, the US might once again begin testing nuclear weapons!
Duck and Cover
Now, imagine this: I was born in the final months of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, just over a year before World War II ended. In my youth, I lived in a world in which the two great powers on this planet, my country and the Soviet Union, were threatening to do us all in atomically. I can still remember ducking and covering under my desk in grade school, hands over my head, as sirens howled outside the classroom window, indicating a Soviet nuclear strike. (It was, of course, just a test.) I can also remember getting duck-and-cover advice from the cartoon character Bert the Turtle, as well as wandering the streets of New York City and seeing (but paying little attention to) the common yellow fallout shelter signs that indicated where you should hide, were an atomic war to suddenly break out. And in my freshman year in college in New Haven, Connecticut, I can remember fearing, because of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, that the world (or at least the East Coast version of it) might be obliterated in a potential nuclear holocaust.
Of course, none of that ever actually happened, and today, 80 years after the first (and last) two atomic bombs were actually used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are no longer nuclear tests or nuclear shelters of any sort. The last US aboveground nuclear test took place in the 1960s and the last underground one in 1992. And few people seem to think about such weapons anymore or the planet-devastating war making that could potentially go with them.
No matter that nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and—count on it!—more will do so in the future; or that nuclear-armed Israel and Russia are both involved in wars at the moment; or that, at one point, Russian President Vladimir Putin did indeed implicitly threaten to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine; or that, in May, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, each possessing about 170 nuclear weapons, faced off against each other, however briefly, in a war-like fashion, with President Trump claiming that he had stopped a nuclear war from happening. (“I’m not going to have you guys shooting nuclear weapons at each other, killing millions of people, and having the nuclear dust floating over Los Angeles.”) Nor does it seem to matter that we now know a significant nuclear war could lead to a “nuclear winter” on planet Earth in which millions of us, including undoubtedly Bert the Turtle, would be likely to starve to death and the planet itself would be devastated.
Do you truly feel confident that we humans will never consider using nuclear weaponry again?
Meanwhile, though the US hasn’t tested an atomic weapon explosively since 1992, President Trump did recently suggest that he might be ready to do so again. As he put it, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” It didn’t. Not yet at least.
No matter that no other country is, in fact, doing actual nuclear testing at the moment, though Russia is indeed testing nuclear delivery systems, or that the US military hasn’t (yet) followed up on the president’s statement by preparing to do so. The only country to have openly tested a nuclear weapon since the 1990s is, in fact, North Korea. Nonetheless, my own country now has an estimated more than 5,000 nuclear weapons out of the more than 12,000 believed to be on this planet, whether aboard nuclear submarines that travel the globe’s oceans (while a “next generation” of nuclear subs is now being built), in missile silos on land, or in storage.
Worse yet, the US military has plans to put $1.7 trillion—no, that is not a misprint!—into keeping the American nuclear arsenal in what passes for good shape over the next three decades, while producing yet more such weaponry in the years to come. And do you really feel confident that Israel or, in the future, Iran, or right now North Korea would never under any circumstances consider using such weaponry? Donald Trump certainly didn’t feel confident of that, or why would he have bombed Iran’s still-peaceful nuclear sites this year?
And sadly, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, there is no significant American or global protest movement calling on this country and other countries to reduce, not to say eliminate their nuclear arsenals. In some fashion, however strangely, the nuclear form of potential end times, of ultimate destruction, has generally been ignored (except, of course, by those producing, handling, or storing such weaponry).
And honestly, given the strange history of humanity and the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet, despite those 80 years of no use—I wish I could say uselessness!—do you truly feel confident that we humans will never consider using nuclear weaponry again?
The Slow-Motion Equivalent of Nuclear War
And consider it truly strange that we humans have come up with not one but two ways to potentially do ourselves and this planet in and the second one, unlike the nuclear version, is already quite literally in process. In some eerie sense, in fact, our world could indeed be considered, though it’s seldom thought of that way, as in a slow-motion, climate-change version of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After all, the rising heat that fossil fuel burning continues to produce globally is already estimated to be killing a person a minute on this planet. That’s millions of us annually. And worse yet, it’s guaranteed to grow significantly harsher in the decades to come.
And when it comes to climate change, unlike nuclear warfare once upon a time, there are no warning sirens or shelters, nor are its “weapons” stored in arsenals. In their own strange fashion, they are instead being both produced and exploded right before our eyes. And strangely enough, while no nuclear war has yet happened, the climate-change version of such a conflict is distinctly ongoing. That means, whether you care to think about it or not, that each of us is now facing a slow-motion version of end-of-worldism in our own lives right now, even though most of the time you’d hardly know it.
Not just Donald Trump but all too many other leaders globally are at work making things worse.
Yes, the waters of this planet are heating and rising, wildfires growing ever fiercer, floods ever more extreme, and the temperature globally is distinctly climbing in a fashion that should be considered all too unnerving. After all, the last 10 years have been the warmest in human history; 2024 was the warmest year ever experienced, and 2025 looks likely to be the second or third warmest of all time. Unlike the nuclear version of ultimate destruction, in other words, the climate one is happening right now, even if in slow motion. And yet, here’s the truly eerie thing: Most days, if you read the mainstream media or watch the mainstream TV news, climate change is seldom headline making. You would certainly have little sense from the media that, at this very moment, we’re already in the midst of a distinctly apocalyptic, if slow-motion event. Most of the time, given what we humans are doing to each other from Ukraine to the Middle East, it’s at best secondary news.
In case you hadn’t noticed (and you surely have), whatever Donald Trump does—quite literally anything, even picking his nose, no less meeting in the White House with New York’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani—instantly gets more attention than the world-devastating situation we’re living through every moment of every day (and night). Someday, if historians still exist on this planet of ours, I suspect Donald J. Trump will appear, in the grimmest sense imaginable, to be an eerie wonder of these eerie times; a president who, faced with a possible global Armageddon, did everything he could to bring it on, from opening ever more land and waters to fossil fuel production to shutting down anything that has to do with the production of renewable, non-carbon energy.
Though few would ever think of it this way, a child born today is, in truth, being delivered into the slow-motion climate equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for such a kid, there’s unlikely to be any ducking and covering. And yet not just Donald Trump but all too many other leaders globally are at work making things worse. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the president’s decision to open those 1.3 billion acres of coastal waters to further drilling for oil and natural gas, China’s willingness to build significant numbers of new coal-burning power plants, or Vladimir Putin’s desire to continue, even intensify the human activity that may put more heat-inducing carbon into the atmosphere than any other, military activities of just about any sort but, above all else, making war.
Only the other week, in fact, while the COP30 Climate Summit was underway, Donald Trump, the president of the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas, the man who has done everything he possibly could to shut down green projects of any sort, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose state oil company, Aramco, remains a monster producer of oil and natural gas. And can there be any doubt that such a meeting at such a moment was intended to be a global slap in the face to efforts of any sort to bring climate change under control and an implicit (or perhaps I mean explicit) promise to take us all to hell in a handbasket?
As someone who, at 81, has kids and grandkids, I fear for the world that Donald Trump, Mohammed bin Salman, and so many other figures on this planet, including Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, are preparing for them. Thought of a certain way, our planet is indeed experiencing the slow-motion, climate-change equivalent of nuclear war and yet it’s hardly even news. And if that isn’t truly bizarre, what is?
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Spending More Money on New Nukes Is a Moral Obscenity
The world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge.
Dec 02, 2025
It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new chief of staff of the Air Force. Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM, or intercontinental ballistic missile, and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)
In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: It will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.
At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.
So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.
I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite
My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.
Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.
I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation, and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded—perhaps too crowded.)
It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal.
Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.
Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.
That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.
Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the US and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.
Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.
If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.
My Date With Trinity
After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.
And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends,” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.
Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need. To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.
The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons
That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the US military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.
Take it from this retired officer: You simply can’t trust the US military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.
Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:
I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.
Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.
Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense—even world-ending—power.
The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.
No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.
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Trump: A Symptom of the End of the World?
The president of the United States is deeply involved in dealing with the two ways we human beings have figured out how to destroy ourselves (and potentially so much else on this planet): nuclear war and climate change.
Nov 18, 2025
When I began TomDispatch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, believe me, the world did not look good. But I guarantee you one thing: If you had told me then that, almost a quarter of a century later, the president of the United States would be Donald J. Trump (and had explained to me just who he was), I would have thought you an idiot first class or totally mad! Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, not just once, but twice? In what century? On what planet? You must be kidding! (And what a dreadful joke at that!)
Now, of course, I would have to put all of that in the past tense (and probably add yet more exclamation points)!!
Once upon a time, you could never have convinced me (or just about anyone else) that we would find ourselves in such a world. Living in it now, however, it’s all too easy to see—yes!—President Donald Trump as a (if not the) crucial actor (making up his lines as he goes along) in a potentially devastating planetary drama still distinctly in development. (And I’m not even thinking about the possibility that, in the not-too-distant future, he might actually order some kind of invasion of, or assault on, Venezuela!) What’s rarer is to imagine him as a genuine symptom of this world’s end (at least as we human beings once knew it).
(And yes, there are indeed a lot of parentheses in this piece so far, perhaps because, at almost 81 and a half, I feel increasingly parenthetical to this eerily strange world of ours.)
He’s clearly right that heaven will indeed be a problem for him, since he’s so intent on sending us all, himself included, to hell in a handbasket.
Okay, I know, I know, all of that couldn’t sound more extreme. And unfortunately, that’s not even the half of it. After all, at this very moment, the president of the United States is deeply involved in dealing—in a fashion that would once have seemed as unimaginable as Donald Trump himself—with the two ways we human beings have figured out how to destroy ourselves (and potentially so much else on this planet): nuclear war and climate change.
Think of “President” Trump, in short, as a twofer when it comes to potential planetary destruction. And once upon a time (twice upon a time?), who would have imagined that possible when it came to a president of the United States? I’ll say it again: the “president” (and given the strange circumstances of this world of ours, that word does seem to me to need quotation marks!) of—nowhere else but—the United States of America! (And yes, we do seem to be on a planet where exclamation points can’t be used too often!! In fact, we may truly need some new symbol for the extremity of this world of ours!!!)
Okay, let me calm down a bit. After all, so many years after he first entered the White House, it’s true that, if you check statistician Nate Silver’s website, the president’s approval figures are indeed dropping significantly. But that may not, in the end (and “end” is anything but an inappropriate word here), truly matter to the man who clearly thinks better of himself than anyone else on this planet and possibly any other planet, even if he does now worry about whether or not, in the next life, he’ll actually make it to heaven. (“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he said recently. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”)
Nonetheless, I’d advise Saint Peter, if he’s still holding the keys to that kingdom’s gateway, to watch out. For his own safety, I’d urge him to consider burying those keys and stepping aside. (Oh, and let me use parentheses—and dashes—again here to suggest, sadly enough, that Donald J. Trump couldn’t be less dashingly parenthetical in this all too strange world of ours and, for all we know, the next one, too.) In fact, should he indeed surprise himself and the rest of us by making it to heaven, count on something else—and yes, I’ll need a colon here (lots of punctuation being necessary to deal with You Know Who): Expect him to tear down those ancient pearly gates and begin building a heavenly—or do I mean hellish?—version of Mar-a-Lago up there; in short, a new East Wing of heaven.
Living in a Sci-Fi World
In the 1950s and 1960s, from Brave New World and 1984 to Fahrenheit 451, I grew up on dystopian fiction and sci-fi, but honestly, there wasn’t a shot in hell of a chance that Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or Ray Bradbury, amazing as each of them was, could ever have imagined Donald Trump. (Think of him, in fact, not as Big Brother but perhaps as Humongous Brother.) If any of them had done so back then, rest assured that they wouldn’t have sold a copy of a book with such a ludicrous, unrealistic character and plot line. It tells you something that former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died recently, the fellow who became “the Darth Vader” of the administration of George W. Bush and helped launch the disastrous post-9/11 American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, by opposing Trump, now seems almost like a positive figure by comparison.
After all, today, Donald J. Trump has his hands on (all over, in fact) the two distinctly apocalyptic and all too science-fictional ways we humans have discovered to do in ourselves and much of the rest of the planet. Only recently, he demanded that the US military start testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992. In fact, on Truth Social, just minutes before he met with China’s President Xi Jinping, he stated that he had ordered “the Department of War” to resume such tests. “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes,” he recently told CBS’ Norah O’Donnell. “Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it.”
Hmm, not only don’t they talk about it, but as far as anyone on this planet other than Donald Trump can tell, like the United States, neither of those countries has tested a nuclear weapon since the 1990s. But no matter. If President Trump wants to set off new nuclear explosions on Planet Earth, why shouldn’t he? What harm could he possibly do? (Admittedly, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is talking about responding in kind and is indeed already testing nuclear delivery systems.). And if it led to a future nuclear confrontation with either Russia or China, honestly, how bad could that possibly be? Well, yes, if such testing were indeed to lead to an actual nuclear conflict, there is the possibility of creating what’s come to be known as “nuclear winter” on Planet Earth, but let’s not go there. (Brrr…) And mind you, that’s the less likely of the two possible ways President Trump could bring end-of-the-world possibilities into the everyday lives of us all.
With Donald Trump in the White House, consider us lucky (after a fashion) that we haven’t yet come up with a third or fourth way to do this planet and ourselves in, because count on this: He’d be on it instantly.
The other way—what might be thought of as a future climate-change summer—would be a slow-motion version of atomic hell, thanks to the pouring of endless amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, and so potentially heating this planet to the boiling point. Sadly enough, that possibility seems to fit Donald Trump’s skill set to a T. After all, though few may remember this anymore, he won his presidency the second time around on the stunningly blunt slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill,” which really couldn’t have been a more forthright promise about what he planned to do if reelected. Yes, let me say it one more time—pour greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels into our atmosphere in a distinctly hellish fashion. And give him credit, when it comes to campaign promises made in 2024, he’s proven (at least on this one issue) to be a man of his word.
After all, his record after only one term in office was impressive enough, although, on this strange planet of ours, he was anything but alone. (Good job, Vlad!) Just consider the fact that the last three summers have been the three hottest in recorded history, while 2024 was the warmest year on record (and 2025 is likely to come in second or third). In fact, a recent report found that a person somewhere on Earth is now dying every minute from rising global heat, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. And none of that is faintly stopping Donald Trump from acting to ensure that the future will be so much worse. After all, barring a total surprise, he’ll have three more years to continue what he’s been doing from the first day of his second term in office: “unleashing” oil, natural gas, and coal in any way he can. (Mind you, to put things in even grimmer perspective, under Joe Biden, a president who claimed to be determined to decarbonize our world, US oil production hit a record high in 2024.)
Only recently, for instance, President Trump opened the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which is estimated to hold billions of barrels of crude oil, to fossil-fuel drilling. And that’s just one—let me put this as mildly as I can, though I’m already sweating—modest act of his. Meanwhile, he’s been going out of his way to discourage the production of clean energy, especially wind power, in any way he can. As the British Guardian reported recently, a total of nine offshore wind projects set to provide electricity to nearly 5 million American households and create about 9,000 jobs in this country are already under investigation or have been paused by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, approvals of oil and gas drilling permits are—I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn—distinctly on the rise.
And give him credit for accuracy: He’s clearly right that heaven will indeed be a problem for him, since he’s so intent on sending us all, himself included, to hell in a handbasket. But here’s the thing when it comes to climate change: None of this should faintly be a surprise. All of it was apparent enough in his first term in office and yet Donald (“drill, baby, drill”) Trump was indeed reelected in 2024, despite what everyone should have known about his plans for this planet and the rest of us.
A Slow-Motion Version of a Global Nuclear Catastrophe
With Donald Trump in the White House, consider us lucky (after a fashion) that we haven’t yet come up with a third or fourth way to do this planet and ourselves in, because count on this: He’d be on it instantly. And yet, sadly enough, two ways are undoubtedly going to be plenty. Or even one way, since I must admit that I find it hard to believe that even Donald Trump is going to get us into an actual nuclear war. Unfortunately, with him, I certainly wouldn’t rule anything out, but somehow it doesn’t seem likely.
And yet, if you think about it, in some sense, we’re already in the equivalent of a nuclear war, since climate change just happens to be a slow-motion version of a global nuclear catastrophe. Think of the release of all those greenhouse gases as indeed a long-term version of that nuclear mushroom cloud, blasting this planet in a fashion that’s likely to lead to an all too literal hell on Earth in the decades to come.
And if we’re indeed heading into such a landscape, then consider Donald J. Trump a slow-motion version of Satan (as are Vladimir Putin and all too many other global leaders). Certainly, his policies are making a mockery of global efforts (however modest) to rein in greenhouse gases. In some way, what lends him such a hand is the very fact that, unlike a nuclear war, climate change, being a slow-motion version of global hell, is strangely hard to take in.
Whether Donald Trump makes it to heaven or not, there can be little question that his legacy on earth will be satanic indeed.
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