Trump’s Nuclear Experience
In 1987, he set out to solve the world’s biggest problem.
'Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Donald Trump with the nuclear “football,” the so-called black briefcase of doom, always within reach. The briefcase with the nuclear targeting codes: China yes? Moscow no?
Donald Trump with the power to destroy life on earth. At the heart of the near hysterical (and mostly justified) Fear of Trump that escalates as he approaches the Republican nomination is the Fear of Trump With the Trigger. That explosive temperament combined with that explosive capability.
But it has largely been forgotten that Trump is not new to nuclear matters. He has been thinking about how he’d handle nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation for more than a quarter-century, at least since 1987, when he claimed to me that he was “dealing at a very high level” with people in the White House (that would have been the Reagan White House) on doomsday questions.
It seemed like a joke, when I first heard of it back then. But at the very peak of the Cold War, when the U.S. and the then Soviet Union had an estimated 25,000 nukes to target at each other, thousands of them on hair-trigger alert (no Trump jokes about “hair trigger” please), Donald Trump announced that he had the know-how to solve the world’s nuclear problems.
Trump … to the rescue?
At the time few took him seriously. I’m not sure that I took him entirely seriously. When I sat down to lunch with him to ask him about his nuclear ideas, I was trying to strike a balance between two conflicting internal reactions: snark at Trump’s demeanor—there was his extended, odd riff about Muammar Qaddafi’s pilot, for example, a key source according to Trump. There was an implication that we needed to bomb the French to stop them from supplying the Libyans. And yet on the other hand, it was an undeniably serious subject that deserved more attention. I’d already written for Harper’s about the surreal, chilling experience of going down into nuclear silos, holding the launch keys in my hand, and the strange metaphysics of nuclear strategy. I’d discussed the end of the world with missile crewmen who could bring it about. It’s the kind of thing that stays on your mind. Eventually I wrote a book about the nuclear question, How the End Begins. But back then I thought an interview with Trump might at least raise the profile of an issue—the end of the world—that I thought people were not paying enough attention to. Even if it took a madman like Trump ...
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