( Tomdispatch.com ) – Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come.
Given how obvious all of this has become, we should get full credit not just for creating such conditions but for — at least some of us — ignoring them or, in the case of Donald J. Trump, that pal of fossil-fuel billionaires, doing far worse than that. After all, my country, which has already played such a major role in intensifying climate change, thanks to its record-setting production of greenhouse-gas-producing crude oil — more than any country ever (yes, ever!) — and natural gas, has also managed to elect a climate-change-denying president for the second time. And he’s quite bluntly dismissed the phenomenon as a “scam” and a “hoax.”
Worse yet — I hate to use the word, so I’m putting it in quotation marks — “we” elected him on a platform of “drill, baby, drill!,” which was the very phrase he most wanted to be identified with in his third run for the presidency. You couldn’t be much blunter than that and still succeed, could you?
In truth, he undoubtedly should be called Apocalyptic Don, since his immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet. Consider it an irony of sorts that, in his second term in office, the president who is against immigrants — no matter that his mother was one — is already acting in a way that, by heating the planet further and driving ever more people from their increasingly devastated lands, will increase that phenomenon immeasurably.
Irony? Don’t even think it! Not with Donald Trump in the White House, not after we’ve just passed through Earth Day 2025 with a president who seems determined to un-Earth us all.
Honestly, that “drill, baby, drill” phrase of his couldn’t have been blunter, could it? And worse yet, unlike so much else that he’s said, he really meant it! Now that he’s back in the White House for a second time, he’s already doing his damnedest to increase drilling for oil and natural gas in the United States and globally, while he’s determined to bring back the worst of all greenhouse-gas producers, coal. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s been doing his damnedest as well to stop, if not humanity, then at least Americans from producing energy in ways that won’t pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Only his recent tariffs may stand in the way of his push to get oil companies to drill ever more.)
And hey, the president who hates “big, ugly windmills” has already been at work (if you don’t mind my using the word) torching wind-energy projects, including recently Empire Wind 1, which was to be the first major power project of its sort in a planned buildup of wind farms off the coast of New York State. Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us, not if it in any way hurts the fossil-fuel industry (which put so many millions of dollars into his recent reelection campaign). And similarly, his administration is planning to place tariffs of up to 3,521% (no, that is not a misprint!) on solar panels imported from Southeast Asia. I mean, you get the idea, right?
Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? Or rather, once upon a time, if you had done so, no one would have believed you. And yet here we are, watching this planet on its way down, down, down, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion, with not just a single helping hand but at least two of them from the president of the United States. And if that isn’t apocalyptic, what is? In fact, it isn’t faintly unreasonable, when it comes to climate change, to call him (in Mafia terms) the Apocalyptic Don.
A World of Nukes
Of course, when you think about it, humanity could save itself from the long-term destructiveness of climate change in a remarkably easy fashion. All we would have to do is bring to bear on this planet the other form of ultimate destruction that has (in)humanity — that is, us — written all over it.
After all, when it comes to self-destruction, since August 6th and 9th, 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped with devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, we humans have had the ability, then only potential but by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis actual, to literally devastate this planet by creating what has come to be known as — forget global warming — a “nuclear winter.” We could by now destroy ourselves (or at least millions or even, over time, billions of us) with more or less the snap of a nuclear finger. Under the circumstances, consider it a largely unnoted and unmentioned miracle that, almost 80 years later, while such weaponry has spread far and wide, there has never been another Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-style catastrophe, no less one for Planet Earth itself (in terms of the potential destructiveness of such a nuclear winter and the large-scale global famine that would follow it).
Still, here’s the strange thing (or, in the age of Donald Trump, perhaps it would be safer to say, a strange thing): nuclear weapons and what they could do to this planet are distinctly not in the news anymore, with the sole exception not of the weaponry now possessed by nine countries — the United States, Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — but of the possible future nuclear arsenal of a nonnuclear power, Iran. In 2018, if you remember, Donald Trump tore up the nuclear deal by which that country had agreed never to make such weaponry, but he’s now back in negotiations with its leaders on a similar agreement.
And here’s the even stranger thing, so let me mention it a second time. Consider it the unmentioned miracle — yes, a genuine miracle — of our era (one otherwise remarkably lacking in them): in the nearly 80 years since that second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki, while nuclear weapons have proliferated and grown potentially ever more devastating on Planet Earth, not one has ever been used again.
Here’s what makes that strange indeed, even possibly miraculous: nuclear weapons aside, it seems as if, at any moment, some of us humans are always at war. At this moment, in fact, at least three devastating wars are underway — in Ukraine, Gaza and associated areas of the Middle East, and Sudan, two of them involving nuclear powers (Russia and Israel).
Today, such world-ending weaponry can still be delivered by plane as in 1945, or by land-based missiles, or missiles on submarines and, according to the Federation of American Scientists, there are now an estimated 12,331 nukes in the arsenals of the nine nuclear powers, ranging from 5,449 in Russia’s and 5,277 in the American one to, at the other end of the scale, 90 for Israel and 50 for North Korea.
And don’t for a second assume that those nine will be the last countries to create nuclear arsenals.
Think, for instance, of South Korea, facing a nuclear-armed North Korea, or, yes, Iran, facing a nuclear-armed Israel. And yet, except for the years when such weaponry was tested in the open or underground (something the Trump administration has at least considered doing again), not one has ever been used.
Of course, recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said his country “reserved the right” to use what are now known as “tactical” nuclear weapons (most of which are significantly more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in his war on Ukraine, but so far at least that’s been an empty threat. And yes, China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal at a rapid pace, making it the third great nuclear power after the U.S. and Russia to have the fate of the Earth in its hands.
And when it comes to my own country, unlike with climate change, Donald Trump has long seemed distinctly anti-apocalyptic when it comes to such weaponry. As he once put it, “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and” — referring to Russia and China — “they’re building nuclear weapons.” In a 2018 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he even called such weaponry “the biggest problem in the world” and has long warned of the possibility of a devastating “World War III.”
But no matter, the country he now rules (more or less) is still spending $75 billion annually and, as of now, planning to spend $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to update or — the term of the day — “modernize” the American nuclear arsenal, while Russia and China are both working to update or, in China’s case, vastly expand theirs.
If you stop to think about it for a moment, that our world has not been devastated by nuclear weapons should, under the circumstances, be considered little short of miraculous.
Nuclear Winter or Climate-Change Summer?
Oh, and in case you feel relieved that, after so many decades, humanity hasn’t destroyed itself, despite having the ability to do so, take a breath. After all, it’s increasingly possible that, at some future moment, this planet could be blown apart without human beings initially doing much of anything. Yes, I’m thinking about artificial intelligence (AI), or worse yet, artificial general intelligence (AGI). After all, American military commanders like Air Force General Anthony J. Cotton are already talking about how “AI will enhance our decision-making capabilities” when it comes to nuclear weaponry and, even though he also warns that we should never allow AI to make nuclear decisions for us, letting another “intelligence” loose in the nuclear realm seems anything but a safe or sound thing to do.
Indeed, who knows what a future independent intelligence might decide to do with such weaponry on this planet of ours?
And there’s another thing that’s seldom thought about: What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating? After all, there’s no reason to believe that there are only two conceivable ways to do in a world like ours.
Consider all of this, after a fashion, both a story of epic failure and, at least in the case of nuclear weapons, strange success.
Still, isn’t it odd that, although we don’t often think about it, at any moment we live on the edge of ultimate destruction, whether immediately via a nuclear war or in a long-term fashion via a slow-motion version of the destruction of this planet, leading not to nuclear winter but to what might be thought of as climate-change summer? And yet, while the reality of climate change has at least led to major protests in recent times, the continued nuclear arming of this country and the planet has not.
Consider all of this a strange mixture of epic failure and eerie success in a world that — thank you, Donald Trump (but by no means just him) — is becoming more deadly by the month.
Whether in the short or long run, we, our children, and our grandchildren stand an all-too-unreasonable chance of living on a failed planet.
Copyright 2025 Tom Engelhardt
Via Tomdispatch.com
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