Trump's ceasefire crumbles as nuclear nightmare scenario remains imminent threat

On the Tuesday the president of the United States threatened genocide against Iran, smoke drifted into our town from the southwest, an acrid veil that hung over streets and homes and businesses.

The haze contributed to the day’s unsettled mood.

The smoke came from controlled fires that slither like snakes over the Flint Hills each spring. These vernal fires are meant to keep invasive plants in check and help renew the grass, but the great clouds they produce sting the eyes and prick the throat. At our home on Constitution Street in Emporia, you could taste the burned prairie with every breath.

It was a fitting atmosphere in which to await the apocalypse.

Whether the president’s threat was sincere or not was beside the point in our new age of nuclear proliferation. A misstep, a mistake, a misread communication might trigger doomsday.

The war with Iran was already troubling my sleep.

In my dreams I often work on machines with tools passed down by my father. Sometimes the machines are recognizable, the cylinder heads on a Ford V8, and other times they are mysterious and their purpose undefined. But on recent nights a new dream had taken hold, one in which I’m following endless M.C. Escher-like staircases to an unknown destination. You probably know the Escher lithograph called “Relativity.”

Current events prove just as enigmatic.

The president had set a deadline of 7 p.m. central for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face the death of their civilization. We were used to bluster from the president, but this threat — posted Tuesday morning on social media — was different. It announced his intention to commit genocide, a war crime under international law. While he did not identify the means by which he would destroy a country of 93 million people, a nuclear strike seemed the only option to accomplish the unthinkable.

It was an unprecedented statement by an American president, one that both shocked the conscience and turned the stomach. As the deadline approached Tuesday, I had a mounting fear that the president was so compromised by mental instability, desperation, or foreign influence that he would actually give the order to launch.

I thought of other events in American history the Iran deadline might be compared to. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps. But in my memory, the feeling of anxiety was closest to the fear and uncertainty of Sept. 11, 2001.

What was there to do?

Kim and I walked the smoke-shrouded streets to our local tavern and had a drink. The television was on behind the bar, but it was showing a cartoon, not the news. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.

We sat down with our drinks (a beer for me, a gin cocktail for her) and pondered our approach to days. Philosophy has been a frequent topic at our dinner table recently because Kim has declared she may be a Stoic. She’s been reading “How to be a Stoic” by Massimo Pigliucci. It has informed many of our conversations about what is the appropriate response to matters beyond our control.

But how do you know where to draw that line?

Stoics would draw the line at epistemology, Kim told me. What can we know about the problem and what can we do about what we know? If the president means the threat, he’s a tyrant and a psychopath, and if not, he’s a liar and a bully.

We have no control over a president’s threat to destroy a nation, but we do have control over our response to that threat. Do we ignore it? Do we applaud it? Do we condemn it and urgently start calling our members of Congress to share our alarm?

Or perhaps you traverse the smoke-filled streets and take refuge in the nearest bar, make notes for a column, and have a couple of drinks.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a chess game between the White House and the Kremlin, in which we came the closest to a nuclear exchange. It ended with the Soviets publicly agreeing to recall missiles from Cuba and the United States secretly promising to remove its missiles from Turkey. It moved both countries toward a nuclear test ban treaty and established a direct communication “hotline” between the two superpowers.

Then there was Sept. 11, 2001 — a Tuesday.

Most of us are old enough to remember the events of that day, the airliners crashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and later watching as the towers collapsed, one after the other, on live television. I have friends in New York who witnessed some of these events in real life. Our collective sense of shock was as profound as our sense of horror, and to understand it we had to reach all the way back to 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Our response to 9/11 kicked off the Global War on Terrorism, which was doomed to fail because you can’t wage war against an overwhelming sense of fear. It also led us into 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, campaigns that we arguably lost, despite the investment of thousands of American lives and trillions of American dollars. At home, we traded freedoms — at our airports, public buildings and institutions — for the hollow promise of security.

The average American had no way of predicting any of this on that Tuesday in 2001. We reeled from the shock and trusted, for better or worse, our leaders to guide us through. We bought flags and flew them from our porches, and for a time we were swept by an understandable sense of patriotism.

But last Tuesday was not Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Those events are unmatched in terms of American lives lost and a shared national commitment. Both led to years of collective effort and helped define the best of America, and the worst: Omaha Beach, Hiroshima, Flight 93 and Abu Gbraib.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unilateral nuclear attacks that redefined the horror of war for civilian populations. There are now at least nine global nuclear powers, and they collectively hold 12,187 warheads, according to estimates by the Federation of American Scientists.

Russia and the United States have roughly the same amount of deployed and stockpiled nuclear weapons, just more than 5,000 each, or a combined 86% of the global inventory. While the world’s nuclear arsenal is down from its high of about 60,000 warheads in 1986, reports the Union of Concerned Scientists, the weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity.

In the U.S., the president can order the launch of nuclear weapons without consulting anyone. This is why we must take any threat from an American president at face value. Our enemies do.

The launch of a nuclear missile anywhere — or the false alarm of a launch — can trigger a cascade of actions, resulting in a world-ending global nuclear exchange in little over an hour.

“Nuclear War,” a 2024 book by Annie Jacobsen, imagines that scenario. The 400-page volume describes in terrifying detail how a full-scale nuclear war would all but instantly end 12,000 years of human civilization. It can all be summed up in one sentence from Jacobsen:

“Nuclear war is insane.”

While the rational among us recoil from doomsday scenarios, there is a significant faction that may long for nuclear annihilation. I was first introduced to the phenomenon as a kid.

I spent most of one summer smoking and reading in a tent in our back yard, and one of the titles I picked up was “The Late Great Planet Earth,” a book by Hal Lindsey that attempted to interpret 1970s current events through biblical prophecy. The end of the world was just around the corner, Lindsey claimed, but Christians would be spared the tribulation by being raptured to meet Jesus in the sky.

Some of my friends and their parents believed this, but I wasn’t buying.

My summer reading of Lindsey did, however, provide me with an introduction to evangelical Christian eschatology. That movement survives today, is politically active, and sees the president as chosen to fulfill God’s plan. Some see the war with Iran as the unfolding of biblical prophecy. This is reinforced by rhetoric coming from the secretary of defense, who has urged Americans to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

I’ve read the New Testament and don’t recall any red-letter quotes advocating for war or the destruction of civilizations. But the secretary of defense wouldn’t be the first to twist the gospel to suit his own needs. As far as I can tell, holy books are mirrors you hold up to yourself.

As the Iran deadline neared on Tuesday, half of the country was plagued by anxiety while the other half seemed oddly unconcerned. It was as if we were trapped in that Escher print, where multiple sources of gravity allowed people on opposing stairs to go about their business, heedless of others. Congress was on Easter recess. GOP lawmakers appeared to back the president’s threat, whether it was real or a bluff. Democratic lawmakers were alarmed, and some called for the president’s removal. By Thursday, the reluctance Democrats had shown in calling for the vice president and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment appeared to have ended.

At the bar on Tuesday night, I doomscrolled on my phone.

The announcement of a ceasefire, about an hour before the deadline, didn’t provide much comfort. It was only for two weeks, details were scarce, and any truce would be difficult to enforce. Within 24 hours, the ceasefire already appeared to be crumbling. Both sides were claiming victory, the Strait of Hormuz was again closed, and details of the agreement were in dispute.

I finally closed the tabs on my phone.

One of my scribbled notes from the bar read simply: Gödel.

Kurt Gödel was a mathematician and analytic philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and became a naturalized American citizen 10 years later. He had a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he became close friends with Albert Einstein, who couldn’t have done physics without philosophy.

Gödel studied systems. His most influential work was his “Incompleteness Theorems,” which are concerned with the limits of mathematic proofs. They provided the foundation for later the discovery, according to the institute, that a computer can never be programmed to answer all mathematical questions. This preoccupation with systems almost derailed his citizenship test in 1948 because he found what he believed was a logical flaw in the U.S. Constitution. His friends, including Albert Einstein, warned him against bringing it up during the exam.

Known as “Gödel’s Loophole,” the flaw in the Constitution would make it logically possible for somebody to become a dictator and establish a fascist regime. This is what he told the judge administering the test, but the judge dismissed his concern with: “It couldn’t happen here.” The story is recounted by Jill Lepore in a 2021 issue of the New Yorker.

Nobody present at the examination, not Gödel or Einstein or their friend Oskar Morgenstern, ever revealed the nature of the flaw. Scholars believe it probably has to do with Article V, which allows for revision of the Constitution. The problem might be that Article V — which provides for a Constitutional Convention when called for by two-thirds of the states — does not prohibit amendment of Article V itself.

As Lepore points out, that makes it possible for a sufficiently powerful president to persuade his followers to ratify an amendment that gave the president the power to change the Constitution by fiat. At most points in American history, that seemed absurdly unlikely.

But there are now competing laws of gravity.

When I had finished my second beer, we set off.

The air was worse than before. From the pocket of my coat, I fished out a black cloth mask I had used during COVID and gave it to Kim to wear. We walked on through the smoke toward home. It was as if we were breathing risk.

A controlled burn is a calculated risk to improve the landscape. When done responsibly, it also lessens the threat of fire. But it can also get out of control. In April 2021, a controlled burn ignited New Mexico’s largest wildfire.

No threat to use nuclear weapons, either overtly or implied, represents a responsible use of diplomacy. You can’t contain the nuclear fire by setting a smaller one. The danger that it will consume us all is too great.

What Tuesday brought, for no justifiable reason, was a threat of nuclear war and the surrender of American values. We were attacked, but the attack was mounted from within, by a president who rules by mercurial and expletive-laced social media posts. The threat to end a civilization may have marked the final collapse of trust among our allies in the ability of the United States to responsibly govern itself on the world stage.

The civilization Trump may end up destroying is our own.