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What Would It Mean to Remember Hiroshima Without Hypocrisy?
There is no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries, including the one that dropped the first bomb, actively prepare for future nuclear war.
Aug 12, 2025
On August 6, 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the American destruction of Hiroshima. As in decades past, Hiroshima Day served to honor the first victims of atomic warfare and to reaffirm the enduring promise that their suffering would not be in vain, that they and the residents of Nagasaki, devastated three days later in 1945, would be the last places to endure such a fate.
Within that commemorative framework, Hiroshima has been effectively rendered an abstraction and reduced to a cautionary tale. With the involuntary sacrifice of that city and its inhabitants, humanity was offered a profound lesson. In the ruins of Hiroshima, the world confronted a vision of nothing less than its own potential end. And awareness of that apocalyptic possibility emerged almost immediately. The very next day, in fact, the American newspaper PM, based in New York, ran an article speculating on the catastrophic consequences of an atomic bomb detonating in the heart of that very city.
For the first time, thanks to Hiroshima, human beings became an endangered species. People everywhere were presented with an existential choice between the quick and the dead, between one world and none. Humanity could recover its moral bearings and pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons and the renunciation of war, or accept the inevitability that such man-made forces would ultimately abolish most or all of us. (Think “nuclear winter.”) Only through the former could we hope for collective redemption rather than collective suicide.
In our annual ritual of remembrance, Hiroshima is recalled not so much as a site of mass slaughter, but as a symbol of peace, hope, and resilience, a testament to our professed commitment to “never again.” Yet this year, such sanitized appeals of official memory rang increasingly hollow. After all, eight decades later, humanity (or at least its leadership) continues to demonstrate that it learned remarkably little from the horrors of Hiroshima.
At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza.
What, after all, could it mean to commemorate such a moment in a world where today not one, but nine nuclear-armed states hold humanity hostage to the threat of sudden, total annihilation? Worse yet, today’s arsenals contain thousands of thermonuclear weapons, some of them up to 1,000 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Worse yet, those arsenals are being “modernized” regularly, the American one to the tune of $1.5 trillion or more as a significant portion of our national resources continues to be siphoned away from meeting human needs and redirected toward preparations for (in)human destruction.
Worse yet, all too many of those weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to extinguish life on Earth in what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who long ago released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, once described as a “single, immense hammer-blow to be executed with the automaticity of a mousetrap at almost any provocation.”
Under this country’s current launch-on-warning posture, President Donald Trump (and any president who follows him) holds sole, unquestioned authority to initiate a retaliatory nuclear strike, with as little as six minutes to decide following an alert about a possible nuclear attack (despite a well-documented history of false alarms). This scenario also presumes that the U.S. would only be acting in “self-defense” in response to a nuclear strike by another nation, although mutually assured destruction renders such concepts obsolete. In reality, that assumption is far from certain. Washington (unlike, for example, Beijing) has never adopted a no-first-use policy and continues to reserve the right to initiate a nuclear strike preemptively.
Moreover, what does it mean to remember Hiroshima in a world where, while no atomic bomb has been dropped on Gaza, the tonnage of “conventional” explosives unleashed there is already equivalent to six Hiroshima bombings? As the nuclear abolitionist organization Nihon Hidankyo, composed of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, warned in the lead-up to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, the suffering of Gaza’s children all too eerily mirrors their own experiences in Hiroshima.
That city is therefore not merely a past atrocity but an open wound, not simply a lesson of history but an ongoing nightmare. There is, in short, no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries (my own included) actively prepare for future nuclear war.
At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza. Such an approach, in fact, would reflect the way the bomb was originally understood by many of the scientists who built it, sensing that it would prove to be what some of them would soon describe as “a weapon of genocide.”
Destroying Cities and Calling it Peace
After those two atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering up to 210,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians by deliberate design, most Americans responded with relief. Echoing the official narrative, they celebrated the bomb as a triumph of scientific ingenuity and a “winning weapon” associated with bringing a swift and decisive end to World War II, the bloodiest conflict in human history.
Decades of historical scholarship have demonstrated that such a narrative is largely a myth. In the aftermath of those two bombings, a carefully constructed postwar consensus quickly emerged, bolstered by inflated claims that those two bombs were used only as a last resort, that they saved half a million American lives, and, perversely enough, that they constituted a form of “mercy killing” that spared many Japanese civilians. In reality, clear alternatives were then available, rendering the use of nuclear weapons unnecessary and immoral as well as, given the future nuclearization of the planet, strategically self-defeating.
Nonetheless, a war-weary American public overwhelmingly endorsed the bombings. Postwar polls indicated that 85% of them supported a decision made without their knowledge, input, or any form of democratic oversight. Notably, nearly a quarter of respondents expressed a further vengeful, even genocidal disappointment that Japan had surrendered so quickly, denying the United States the opportunity to drop “many more” atomic bombs (although no additional atomic weapons were then available).
It remains unclear whether, had they been ready, Washington would have used them. Despite President Harry Truman’s public posture of steely resolve, his private reflections suggest a deep unease, even horror over their use. As Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, Truman had “given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, all those kids.”
Why, then, were most Americans not similarly horrified? As historians John Dower and Ronald Takaki have shown, such exterminationist sentiments were fueled by anti-Asian racism, which framed the Pacific War in the American imagination as a race war. But perhaps more important, the way had been paved for them by the normalization of the practice of devastating area bombing, or more accurately, the terror bombing of both Nazi Germany and Japan.
Over the course of the war, the United States and Great Britain had “perfected” that indiscriminate method of destruction, targeting civilian morale and the collective will and capacity of a nation to sustain its war effort. This came despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure before the U.S. entry into the war as “inhuman barbarism.”
As Daniel Ellsberg observed, when it came to the rapid erosion of ethical restraints under the exigencies of an existential war, “liberal democracies… in fighting an evil enemy, picked up the methods of that enemy and made them into a private ethic that was indistinguishable really from Hitler’s ethic.” That moral collapse would be evident in the devastation wrought upon the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as in the similar destruction inflicted by the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
That descent into “barbarism” was not lost on contemporary observers. Reflecting on the 1943 Allied bombing of Hamburg, outspoken pacifist Vera Brittain described the destruction as a scene from “the evil nightmare of a homicidal maniac” and as “irrefutable evidence of the moral and spiritual abyss into which Britain and her rulers have descended.” She warned that such actions stemmed from a selective and hypocritical blindness, observing that, “in the Nazis and the Japanese we recognize cruelty when we see it, yet that same cruelty is being created, unperceived, amongst ourselves.”
And such a recognition wasn’t confined to pacifists but extended to policymakers. In response to the devastation caused by the “conventional” bombing campaign against Japan, including the burning to death of as many as 130,000 people in Tokyo in a single night in March 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that, if such attacks continued, “we might get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” (The New York Times reported that the bombing of Tokyo may have killed as many as 1-2 million people. While not necessarily accurate, such reporting reflected a broader desensitization to mass death that had come to define the logic of total war, as well as a growing public tolerance among Americans for urbicide, the city-scale slaughter of civilians.)
On Nazi and Nuclear Holocausts
Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when “mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery.” Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans “on the same moral plane” as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.
American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as “moral monsters,” legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. “In principle,” he wrote, “the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over 6 million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo,” laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.
The specter of Nazism has always loomed large over the atomic bomb. It was, after all, the fear of a Nazi bomb that first catalyzed the Manhattan Project that would create the American bombs. While the fall of the Nazi regime preceded the use of atomic weapons on Japan by nearly three months, as soft-spoken astronomer Carl Sagan once observed, the ideological imprint of Nazism was etched into the littered landscape of charred bodies and scorched earth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It endured in the brutal logic of total war carried forward through the ensuing Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union and culminated in the grotesque accumulation of nuclear arsenals with tens of thousands of world-destroying weapons poised to obliterate humanity.
In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, “The Final Solution to the Human Problem,” Sagan argued that Hitler “haunts our century… [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness.” In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, “the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy… Adolf Hitler lives on.”
Lacking Hitler, Sagan suggested, Washington and Moscow imposed his image on each other. This was necessary because “nuclear weapons represent such a surpassing evil that they can be justified only by an equally evil adversary.” Humanity, he warned, was then locked in a downward spiral into a moral abyss reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. “When we engage in a death struggle with a monster, there is a real danger that we ourselves will, by slow and imperceptible changes, become transmogrified into monsters. We may be the last to notice what is happening to us.”
This influence was evident in the fact that fear of a Nazi bomb had served as the initial impetus for the Manhattan Project and that the future nuclear state would share certain characteristics of the Nazi regime. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described it, such a state would rely on “the genocidal mentality,” a psychological willingness, combined with the technological capacity and institutional planning necessary to, under certain circumstances, deliberately destroy entire human populations.
No More Hiroshimas
In concluding his 1986 address, Carl Sagan warned that World War II had never truly ended. And in a sense, it hasn’t ended even today, given that nine countries now possess such world-destroying weaponry. After all, were a nuclear war to happen in the years to come, a scenario the most powerful states have spent the past 80 years preparing for and making ever more likely, the Allies will have retroactively lost the war. In the radioactive ruins of what was once Washington and New York, Leningrad, Moscow, and Beijing, New Delhi, and Islamabad, no less potentially across much of the rest of this planet, we would witness “the fulfillment of Hitler’s last and maddest vision.”
Such a future is anything but hypothetical. It may, in some sense, already be unfolding around us. It takes no great imagination to envision Hiroshima in the wreckage of Gaza or in the increasingly bombed-out cities of Ukraine. And that’s just a hint of the future, were nuclear weapons ever to be used. If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.
To survive as a species and preserve our humanity, we must, as Dwight Macdonald urged us in August 1945, begin to think “dangerous” thoughts “of sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all [people] everywhere.” Only then could we commemorate Hiroshima Day without the hypocrisy of talking peace while endlessly preparing for a world-ending war. Only then could we begin to fulfill the enduring promise of never again, no more Hiroshimas.
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80 Years of Living and Writing in the Shadow of the Bomb
My acute focus on the danger of nuclear war may stem in part from the accident of my birthday on August 9, 1945.
Aug 09, 2025
I was born on August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, three days after dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Fear of nuclear war was widespread among children of my generation. There were air raid drills where we hid under our desks or crouched alongside the wall in the hall. There were debates about the construction of fallout shelters. Fallout from nuclear testing caused the radioactive element strontium 90 to appear in the milk supply, we were told. When I visited the Oceanside public library when I was 12 or so, I read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Each issue included a picture of a nuclear clock showing how close political and military tension was pushing us to midnight and the risks of a nuclear war, which the scientists viewed as unthinkable.
For my 76th birthday, my older brother Ron gave me a puzzle of The New York Times front page on the day of my birth. The three-line banner headline for the day read: “Soviet Declares War on Japan; Attacks Manchuria, Tokyo Says; Atom Bomb Loosed on Japan.” The importance of the Soviet Union joining in their allies’ war against Japan was rightly emphasized by the Times. Unfortunately, the alliance came apart soon after the end of the war, and the Cold War between two nuclear-armed powers shaped global and domestic politics for over 40 years. Although several arms control agreements were reached between 1963 and 2010, in the last 15 years, the cancellation and suspension of these agreements and increasing political and military tension have put the Bulletin’s clock closer than ever to midnight.
We grew up with the fear that the Cold War could become a nuclear war, and each of us had to decide what attitude to take to both the Cold War and the nuclear danger. My parents shaped my attitudes, raised my brother and me to support unions, working people, and civil rights and to oppose the Cold War and McCarthyism. When playing touch football and other games with three other boys when I was about 12, we debated the U.S.-Soviet conflict. We usually played in a field near the Ocean Lea complex where the three of them lived. Touch football is a pretty easy, fun game to play when it’s two against two, at least when the four players are similar sizes, ages, and skill levels. We took breaks from throwing, running, and catching to debate politics, especially international affairs. In these discussions, I was critical of Cold War confrontation and favored negotiations to reduce the dangers of nuclear war and achieve eventual nuclear disarmament.
My acute focus on the danger of nuclear war may stem in part from the accident of my birthday. I’ve been writing about the dangers presented by nuclear weapons for over 60 years. I hope the reader will forgive me for quoting some of my previous writings.
Cuban Missile Crisis and Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote some political essays for the Oceanside High School newspaper, Sider Press. I wrote an essay about the nuclear danger just before the Cuban missile crisis erupted. I commented:
On a recent television program, Howard K. Smith made the extraordinary statement that President Kennedy was experiencing a decline in popularity because there was no great crisis for him to overcome. Mr. Smith overlooked one extremely important crisis—that of the threatened nuclear holocaust.
If President Kennedy were to effect a decrease in world tension during the next two years, he would undoubtedly be returned to office. The stage would then be set for the president to work toward a successful disarmament agreement during the next four years. If the president accomplished this task, he would become one of the most popular presidents in the nation’s history.
The essay went on to recommend cultural exchanges and a compromise to achieve an end to nuclear testing. “What we need most is for both sides to make a sincere effort to bring about a decrease in world tension. President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev should acknowledge the fact that nuclear war would result in the destruction of mankind. There would be no winner in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.” Before my essay appeared in print, Cold War tensions and the danger of nuclear war reached a peak with the Cuban missile crisis. Eight months after the confrontation over Cuba was resolved by diplomacy, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed on the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
I explored the significance of the events of 1962 and 1963 in an essay published in The Japan Times in 1999:
...the experience of the missile crisis led Kennedy to move away from seeing foreign policy as a tough competitive game. He came to appreciate the human stakes involved. He was, after all, a parent of young children as well as a president.
In a speech at American University on June 10, 1963, Kennedy indicated the changes in his thinking. He said that the U.S. should seek a “genuine peace“ so that nations can “build a better life for their children” rather than a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.“
Casting a critical eye on cold war attitudes, Kennedy sought to “make the world safe for diversity.” He stressed that “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Members of Massachusetts Peace Action, an organization to which I belong, have also been highlighting Kennedy’s American University speech. It’s possible for individuals and presidents to think anew, and it’s dearly needed at a time of the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing and dangerous war in Ukraine.
Ronald Reagan, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, and the INF Treaty
Shortly after he was inaugurated president, I wrote to Ronald Reagan asking him to accept Leonid Brezhnev’s suggestion that they meet in a summit conference:
I am very concerned about the escalation in anti-Soviet rhetoric that has characterized your first weeks in office. A return to 1950s rhetoric can only lead to increasing tensions between our country and the Soviet Union. Such tensions can bring us to the brink of nuclear war again. And who knows if once at the brink, you will be able to stop from falling over into a nuclear holocaust that would destroy us all... Are you afraid that if peace breaks out, you will find it more difficult to line the pockets of the defense contractors with still more billions of taxpayers’ dollars? Whatever your... fears, I believe you should fear nuclear war more. The overwhelming desire of the peoples of the world is to see an end to the nuclear arms race which threatens us all.
Reagan’s initial aggressive posture led to the development of a massive nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. and a movement in Europe against accepting new U.S. intermediate range nuclear weapons. I was among over 1 million people in New York City on June 12 ,1982 demanding that all sides add no new weapons to their nuclear arsenals. It was the nuclear freeze movement, which the Soviet Union supported, and the Reagan administration attacked, that eventually led to a reversal in Reagan’s policy and the adoption of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Initiatives by a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, also played a part in Reagan’s change.
Japan and Peace
About a decade after Reagan left the White House, I was a Fulbright scholar at Tohoku University in Japan. When I arrived in Japan, I mentioned at the initial Fulbright scholar gathering my birth date, my opposition to nuclear weapons, and my experience as part of a generation involved in peace and civil rights activism. Two others around the table, Lois Helmbold, a historian who became a close friend, and Sam Sheppard, the director of the Fulbright program in Japan, mentioned they were also born in 1945. In interviews I’ve conducted with members of my birth cohort, it seemed clear that most of us were influenced by Kennedy’s idea that “the world is very different now.” As San Antonio playwright Sterling Houston put it in my interview with him: “Coming of age in the 60s when there was this ferment [and] the possibilities of change and all this stuff was happening... It seemed like it really could happen... we really could make it better.”
The most memorable experience of my stay in Japan was the visit my younger daughter Leah and I took to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Children’s Peace Monument in Peace Memorial Park. We were already aware of the story of Sadako Sasaki and the folding of paper cranes. Seeing the exhibits in the museum, the monuments, the film Hiroshima: A Mother’s Prayer, and the thousands of cranes in the park brought both of us to tears.
With the danger of nuclear war, greater than ever, we need a renewed grassroots movement to support the eradication of nuclear weapons from the planet.
In an essay published in The Japan Times after I returned home, I commented on the impact of the visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and my concern that Japan was sending 600 soldiers to join the U.S. occupation of Iraq. I mentioned my fear that the government of Japan was undermining the country’s peace constitution. The New York Times article on Japan’s military mission emphasized that the U.S. “imposed” the peace constitution on Japan, but I pointed out the Times failed to note “the strong desire of the Japanese people after the war to break with the militarism and aggression that had brought enormous harm and suffering to Japan’s neighbors and disaster to Japan itself.” I added that “I learned from my time in Japan that strong sentiments for peace and opposition against nuclear arms persist to this day.”
I learned a great deal from the peace museum’s “documentation of the many times my government has threatened to use nuclear weapons and of the continuing advocacy of nuclear disarmament by the citizens and leaders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” I argued, that “at a time when a neoconservative clique seeking world hegemony plays a leading role in U.S. foreign policy formation... Japan’s antinuclear advocacy is needed now more than ever.”
Anti-Nuclear Weapons Advocacy Today
Commemorations of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are taking place throughout the world this week. On August 6, 2025, United Nations Under-Secretary-General Izumi Nakamitsu issued a statement to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on behalf of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres:
...today the risk of nuclear conflict is growing. Trust is eroding. Geopolitical divisions are widening. And the very weapons that brought such devastation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are once again being treated as tools of coercion.
Yet, there are signs of hope.
Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo—which represents the survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings—was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its tireless work in raising awareness about this critical issue.
We must focus our attention on the genocide in Gaza and the “escalating violence” and “forced displacement” in the West Bank, the continuing war in Ukraine, and the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. With the danger of nuclear war, greater than ever, we need a renewed grassroots movement to support the eradication of nuclear weapons from the planet.
Nuclear arms agreements among the nuclear powers are nearly defunct. The people who live in the nuclear armed states need to pressure their governments to eliminate their nuclear stockpiles and instead pursue diplomacy with all the other nations of the world rather than nuclear intimidation.
The United Nations notes that September 26 “The International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons has been observed annually since 2014.” The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted by the United Nations entered into force on January 22, 2021. We the people of the states possessing nuclear weapons must do all in our power to persuade our governments to ratify the treaty and implement its provisions that will lead to a world without nuclear weapons. The survival of humanity is at stake.
This piece was originally published on Martin Halpern’s Substack, A Marxist Writing and Making History.
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Trump Deploys Nuclear Subs in 'Reckless' Response to Russian Official's Provocation
"The bizarre situation is a chilling reminder why it is so dangerous with Trump's finger on the nuclear button," said one nuclear policy expert.
Aug 01, 2025
In an ominous post Friday afternoon, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that he had "ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions" following a provocation by a top Russian security official.
The president was responding to "highly provocative statements" by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council.
Over the past week, Trump and Medvedev have engaged in an escalating war of words regarding Trump's negotiating tactics in the war between Ukraine and Russia.
Trump threatened to impose severe tariffs and sanctions on Russia if it refused to make peace with Ukraine within 50 days, before shortening the timeline to just 10 days.
"Trump's playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10," Medvedev retorted. "Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country."
Trump referenced these comments Friday, saying he deployed the nuclear subs "just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that."
"Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances," Trump added.
Some commentators were quick to note the irony that Trump often warned on the campaign trail that his opponents were bringing America to the verge of "World War III."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said the news was "a reminder that Trump has complete, unilateral authority to launch the U.S. nuclear arsenal."
"Terrifying but true," he said. "Such power should rest with Congress, not an impulsive president."
Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "Trump's announcement... in response to Medvedev's equally stupid statement is deeply irresponsible and reckless."
He noted that Russia's leaders often use "big words," and that "ever since the start of the Ukraine war, U.S. and allied leaders have tried to avoid nuclear saber-rattling and tit-for-tat responses."
Kristensen suggested it was unlikely that Trump's order would result in any significant change to the usual deployments of submarines at sea.
Nevertheless, he said, "the bizarre situation is a chilling reminder why it is so dangerous with Trump's finger on the nuclear button. In a real tense nuclear crisis, this is precisely the reckless stuff he would do that could unnecessarily escalate the crisis."
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