One witness noted that if people thougt he was simply insane he should not be the one to turn the key for the nuclear missile. Or worse, if his sanity was ever so slightly in doubt he should be removed - according to himself.
Odds are everyone's nukes are poorly secured, not just the U.S.. So even if we manage to improve security, it only takes another side to lose their nukes to a not-so-cool-headed actor..
The problem with that argument is that at some point acting insane to keep up pretenses and actually being insane becomes indistinguishable and you end up with the situation that only a young Russian nuclear officer disobeying orders is saving the world from nuclear Armageddon [1]
"he couldn't keep his short, fat fingers from a big red button he couldn't read the label for."
I am pretty sure neither Trump nor any previous presidents were never given that power. That briefcase is just a necessary prop used to build his image of most powerful human being around, but either it doesn't work or, if it does, before the red button pressed signal turns into an attack order it goes through some deep technical error checking and human approval list. That is the same reason there are two pilots on airliners (especially after Germanwings flight 9525): humans can go nuts, even best trained ones although rarely, but if they do with a nuclear button at hand the outcome can be catastrophic.
That's more likely the risk in much smaller countries when they develop the technology necessary to build atomic weaponry, which - though I'm against them on principle - is probably the reason why a very small number of nukes can be still useful as a deterrent.
But on a world size scale, today IMO atomic war should be the least of our concerns.
"Somebody" just proved himself willing and able to hurl nukes at large population centers for no rational reason. Do we cower, pray and hope his psychosis won't target us next, or do we try to take him out as fast as we can?
Interesting. That's strikingly similar to the idea, held by many in the US, that the new nuclear weapons should be utilized against Soviet ASAP, before they had the chance to build their own. Even Bertrand Russell advocated for this.
That someone I hold as a model in so much could display such levels of collective madness is one of those things I use to remind myself, of how fickle we are.
It is, I was alluding to his intuitive understanding of the threats to his position of power. If he threatens to nuke everyone and that is an achievable and possibly believable threat, he may gain a small seat at the global negotiating table
A madman that nobody can predict with the authority to launch nukes is hardly "weak" by any means. How the hell do you know he won't actually do it? Congress constantly had to attempt to reign him in.
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