This is a stupid thing to worry about
I wrote in Fearing the Football about starting work on preventing Donald Trump from starting a nuclear war. Here I want to write about why this is probably a stupid use of energy, and then why I am spending that energy anyway.
There’s an easy and good argument that worrying about nuclear war is not the best use of limited political energy. Presumably Donald Trump isn’t suicidal; we can rely on his self-preservation to keep the rest of us safe, at least at a good probability. Maybe he’s just playing out the “madman theory” and all his alarming statements about nuclear weapons are in service of that. Rather than investing time and energy here, it makes more sense to work on issues that are already happening, like the travel ban and the defunding of Planned Parenthood, or ones that are higher probability, like mass deportations or a challenge to Roe v. Wade.
As a general statement, if your political interests align well with a science-fiction sub-genre, you may well be off-course. (Let’s grant a blanket exception for The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men.) I had this concern when Elon Musk and others started raising alarms about AI taking over the world a few years ago. Years before that, Bill Joy made headlines by worrying about nanotechnology research accidentally destroying the world in a “grey goo” event. Part of working with technology is becoming familiar with all its possible failures, and catastrophizing extrapolation is apparently a periodic risk. And that’s fine, in a way; better to have people at least considering possible risks than not. It just comes at a cost of other areas where we could pay attention or invest. The recent New Yorker article about rich, tech-industry preppers struck me as even worse: not only are we focusing on movie-plot threats over real ones, we’re also imagining that somehow we’ll be the chosen few to escape.
Nuclear apocalypse crosses several science-fiction sub-genres, so my check-yourself alarm bells are at Defcon 1 just talking about it. And yet, and yet. Of course nuclear weapons have been used in war before, by the United States. The Cuban Missile Crisis and Able Archer, among other incidents, gave us very real brushes with an outbreak of large-scale nuclear war. Reading or watching Command and Control will give you nightmares. In our present situation, Trump seems to have a dangerous love affair with nuclear weapons, documented over decades. Yesterday, the New York Times’ editorial board wrote about their concerns with Trump having the ability to use nuclear weapons. None of this is science fiction. It’s definitely low probability, but it’s not low enough.
My very specific fear is that a terrorist group, ISIS being the most obvious candidate, would launch some attack on the United States, and Trump would choose to respond with a so-called “tactical” nuke, which would cause an escalation. I fully admit this is a movie-plot threat and that I have no idea what I’m talking about. But, that’s the whole point of this exercise, which is to see what I can learn about how real the threat is now that Trump is in office.
If this is not a real threat, learning more about the topic will allow me to rest easier, and then I could stop worrying about it and work on something else. Maybe writing about it here will help others with that, too. If it is a real threat, then learning more will help me act on it. Either way, I think the investment of time is worth it.
