Local opinion: Trump’s Iran war raises the risk of a nuclear catastrophe

The tragic irony of President Trump’s war to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon is that America’s leader, in his indolence, may be creating the conditions for the first use of those weapons since World War II. He did so first by walking away from the Iran nuclear deal that placed sharp limits on the country’s production of Uranium, Plutonium, and centrifuges needed to produce a bomb. Among the signatories were the key European nations as well as China and Russia. It was overseen by a blue-ribbon team of nuclear specialists and scientists. By most accounts, it was working.

Trump’s Minni-me is a servile, thick-headed “Secretary of War” who is currently posing for pictures in Presidential primary states where he will apparently be competing for his next job. Meanwhile, Hegseth has emptied the closet of prized conventional weapons, lit fire to regulations that make our military disciplined and strong, removed without cause a generation of top Admirals and Generals --and lost a war. What endears Hegseth to Trump is a similar megalomania and the willingness to issue any crazy order the President utters after midnight.

Egging them on is the brilliant but contemptible Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, who, like our president, has managed to stay just one step ahead of the sheriff. The continuation of war keeps the Israeli leader out of prison on charges of bribery and fraud. What keeps me awake at night is the thought of what these three failing leaders might cook up to punish an opponent who has already won the war.

There is no more important role the American President plays than the management of our nuclear stockpile. Even in peacetime, this task presents a challenge requiring leaders of extraordinary competence. On more than twenty occasions since 1950, early warning systems identified the possibility of incoming nuclear attacks on the U.S. that proved to be false. The demolition of whole societies was averted by a handful of trained specialists and capable political leaders. Beyond the false alerts, there have been at least thirty accidents that could have resulted in nuclear blasts; six involved weapons that have never been found.

Until the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — and especially at the peak of the Cold War — outright conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union rested on the thin reed of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). After the High Noon standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy tilted our policy away from the development of nukes to control them for the first time. By 1968, the U.S, the Soviet Union, and fifty-eight other countries had signed the most consequential arms control in history. Every President that followed emphasized arms control until the arrival of Trump.

Instead, Trump aligned with the radical right-wing to oppose the Iran agreement without any evidence that he understood its terms. His MAGA base roared in approval as he promised to strip Iran of its nuclear capabilities by bullying this nation of almost one hundred million to concede to his demands within weeks of his inauguration. The surprise attack on Israel in 2023 and the war that followed have cost the lives of at least 2,500 Israelis and more than 75,000 Palestinians to date. The combination of the Hamas attack, the persuasiveness of Netanyahu, and a need to distract the media from the domestic scandals persuaded Trump to act.

Not only has this war become another black hole in the Middle East, but the mismanagement of the U.S. troops and supplies also places our responsibilities in other hot spots in jeopardy. As our enemies sense weakness, they grow bolder. Until recently, NUCLEAR was the seven-letter word never spoken in public by leaders of nations with those capabilities. The Russian leader Putin suddenly got loose lips beginning in 2024 as his misguided invasion of Ukraine stalemated and as the enemy drones brought the war to Moscow.

As a child in the 1950’s, I participated each week in an exercise called “Duck and Cover.” When the attack warning came, we would plant ourselves under our desks and cover our eyes. In one way, it was a ridiculous parody of nuclear defense; yet in another, it trained Americans to fear the devastation a single atomic bomb would unleash. Occasionally, A science teacher in high school would review the immediate impact in Hiroshima:

• Heat melting everything within a five-mile radius

• Winds reaching one thousand miles per hour

• Seventy thousand people killed immediately

• Sixty thousand homes destroyed

That was just the beginning of the suffering. Within weeks, one hundred thousand were dead. A whole society of cancer and radiation victims lingered for a while without medical care and died terrible deaths. This was the work of “Little Boy!” Today’s nuclear munitions make these first bombs look like firecrackers.

Americans must begin a reeducation of each generation on what is at stake with these weapons and whom we choose to manage them.