What Would Happen If Trump Woke Up On The Wrong Side Of The Bed?
Would we end up in WW3?
When a friend recently said I “should” be afraid of Kylo Ren because he’s like an angry white supremacist teen who worships Hitler, I said that my lack of visceral reaction isn’t down to me having bad priorities, it’s down to the artists who created Kylo Ren failing to frighten me.
Trump + The Football really scares the shit out of me.
I’ve had a word with a few friends who have worked in high level jobs in the military, or in our government, about my great fear that Trump might have a bad hamburger and decide to launch nukes at North Korea.
The thing about The Nuclear Football is that if the President needs to, he or she can launch a strike on any nation in the world with a few keystrokes. There is a suitcase with nearly all the tech in it, and a card with the codes (The Biscuit). POTUS can launch without consulting with anyone, like Congress, which makes sense when you consider that a sub-launched nuke fired by Russia could land in less than a half hour, and an ICBM can take less than 45 minutes to hit its American target. Once the codes are in, it’s all in the hands of StratCom, or whoever is running the specific weapons system we’re using that engagement.
So what would happen if a bean burrito went down the wrong pipe, someone on Fox News said a bad word at the wrong time, and Trump felt inspired to launch for the fuck of it?
In theory, he’d activate the football, which would send orders to missile silos and subs, and then those silos and subs (and maybe bombers) have people who have a short checklist to go through before nuclear Armageddon. Missiles would be in the air, an exchange would take place, and in a few years we’d all be fighting over gas, driving Ford Falcons like in Mad Max.
Where is the place in this chain where something could just not happen?
Well, there are the men and women manning the arsenal. If they decide not to go, and no one there is ready or available to force their hands, then the weapons are not used. At this point, the military has to seriously rethink what’s going on. If enough people say no, then the whole nuclear deterrent system is washed up. If the Commander in Chief can’t expect his orders to be followed, then no one can. The military has a technical term for this: FUBAR. This outcome is unimaginable on a host of levels, particularly because any such launch would also be telegraphed by the response to the expectation of a launch by all other US military assets (people going into bunkers, ships pulling away from North Korea, etc.) so if we pull the trigger and it jams, so to speak, we’re doing it in a very unsubtle way, and we’ll provoke a counter-strike just as easily as if we’d actually launched from our Trident subs.
The more likely scenario is that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis get together and organize the cabinet to rule the President unfit to govern, and get rid of him. The problem there is that by the time that legal mechanism has worked, the missiles could be in the air and the end could already be beginning.
So here I put on my film maker hat, and play the part of the red team. If this were a movie, what would happen? Well for starters, Mattis would be played by George Clooney. Mattis would also walk around armed, because he’s a fucking badass. This is of course the introduction of Chekhov’s Gun: as soon as we see it appear in act one when Mattis opens his blazer to sit down at his desk, we know it’s going to come out and be pointed at the brain stem of the President at some point. The only dramatic question is this: are the missiles in the air yet?
If the real world comes down to this scenario, we’ve already lost. There aren’t really any good ways of stopping things once the codes are in. Let me be clear: I don’t think the President should have anyone pointing a gun at him, even in these hypothetical circumstances. I also don’t think the President should be relieved of the ability to quickly launch a nuclear counter-strike, because our whole nuclear deterrent philosophy depends on it.
All that said, Donald John Trump is ill-equipped to handle this situation. I can only hope his aides and appointees can contain him long enough for this storm to pass. President Trump doesn’t have the deep well of trust needed to wage a war well, especially one he starts and no one wants. This is urgent because a lot of people, both current and former military, are saying war with North Korea is inevitable, and we may as well do it before they can shower California with nuclear warheads. Worse: they may be right.
Every person has their cause, their moment, their strength. Churchill was a great wartime leader and a terrible peacetime leader. T.R. is loved best perhaps because he didn’t get a second elected term to mess up his own legacy.
More importantly, every leader has their weaknesses. If Obama’s sins were sins of inaction, Trump’s may well be sins of action.
Let’s just hope his sins aren’t the final sins committed by the human race.
