One Man Has the Power to End the World
By: Nicolas Carteron
Tags: Politics, Society, Nuclear Weapons, Trump, USA

We were saved by legitimate doubt and cold reason; by people doing what was right, and not what was ordered of them.

Since Trinity, decades of research have done nothing but increase the destructive power of atomic weapons. While our capacity to inflict damages increased exponentially, our dread of nuclear doom has receded in a similar fashion. We no longer live in constant fear; perhaps we have too much on our plates to think about it; perhaps we’re simply inured to it.

We shouldn’t forget, however, that since the 1950s there have been 14 nuclear close calls. Fourteen times in 70 years we have flirted with the apocalypse, once every five years on average. What prevented it from occurring was the good faith, courage, and cool-headedness of a few people like Stanislas Petrov.

Indeed, in a mutually-assured-destruction standoff, retaliation must be immediate and conducted without doubts or second thoughts. The whole process is designed to exclude human emotions because emotions tend to make one not want to kill billions of people. More importantly, the vacuity of a second strike would compel most people not to order it. All a second strike does is guarantee the end of the world; it doesn’t prevent the damages from the first strike. This is a lose-lose scenario built on the notion that “if I die, everybody should die too.”

The only thing that has saved the world until now is the prevailing of emotions and common sense in situations of emergency. We were saved by legitimate doubt and cold reason; by people doing what was right, and not what was ordered.

A few people have saved us. A few can doom us. One has his finger on the button for 24 more days. And this person is Donald Trump.

The press, the experts, the intellectuals, his political opponents, we, citizens of America and the world, have ve all discussed at great length the changes in US governance that need to happen following Trump’s presidency. A government system based on good faith and “being a gentleman” and founded on the premise that all politicians are honest and well-meaning has proven its limitations. The Founding Fathers never envisioned half of Washington would become what the GOP is today: a personality cult whose only aim is to reduce tax on their wealthy donors’ estates and keep power at all costs. The political system of the US needs a critical update.

The Founding Fathers never considered the nuclear bomb either. That the President would one day possess a power so immense it could be considered divine cannot have possibly touched their minds. That, through firepower, the President would act as an absolute ruler on the lives of all citizens of the world is something they simply couldn’t conceive. Yet, here we are, subjects of a man’s desires, vassals of our nuclear overlords. For Humanity’s sake, the US must also update its nuclear strategy and rethink the powers given to the President.

We all live under the threat of nuclear Armageddon. We all live a few inches away from destruction, a mere step separating us from the precipice.

And, for 24 more days, the man who gets to decide whether we take that step and throw ourselves in the abyss is Donald Trump.