To Kill a Civilization: The Atomic Era in the Age of Trump
by Henry Boehm, Staff Writer
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” This was the threat issued by Donald Trump in the early hours of April 7th to pressure Iran into opening the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping corridor for global oil trade. Iran closed the strait on February 28, when the United States and Israel initiated a war of aggression against Iran through sweeping airstrikes which killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Trump followed his threat with a renewed ultimatum: If Iran didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m., the United States would do… something. Trump didn’t specify exactly how the U.S. would retaliate beyond implying a “civilization-killing” escalation against the already-battered Iran.
Regardless, Trump’s threat triggered a day-long global panic. What could escalation mean when the United States and Israel were already launching indiscriminate airstrikes against military and civilian targets alike? Thousands of Iranians had already been killed in strikes against bridges, trains, factories, mosques, and elementary schools, and Trump had repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s energy grid and water infrastructure, war crimes which would be devastating for millions of Iranian civilians.
Everyone knew, even if they didn’t say it outright, what such an escalation might look like—what exactly Trump implied when he threatened to kill a civilization. It’s something you were unlikely to hear explicitly named in news coverage of Trump’s threat, or cited by congressional Democrats calling for JD Vance to invoke the 25th Amendment and strip Trump of his presidential powers (good luck with that one).
That thing is nuclear war. It’s no secret that the United States maintains a massive arsenal of over 5,000 nuclear warheads, and that the president possesses the unilateral authority to deploy any number of these warheads at the metaphorical push of a button. Israel, too, for that matter. Don’t let its policy of “deliberate ambiguity” fool you—Israel maintains a nuclear arsenal containing an estimated 100 to 400 warheads. At any moment, either country could launch a nuclear strike against Iran. A single warhead could level a city; a few dozen would make Trump’s civilization-ending threat a reality.
It’s clear that the United States and Israel are not restrained by moral qualms. Trump has already threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” And during the course of the Gaza genocide, several Israeli politicians, including a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, have called for the use of nuclear weapons against Gaza. Of course, this hasn’t happened—but how much would really be different if it did? Israel may as well have dropped a nuke on Gaza considering the scale of destruction wreaked by their conventional bombing campaign. The United States and Israel are ready and at least somewhat willing for the nuclear option—Iran has no nuclear weapons of its own, and couldn’t even retaliate in kind. So why, then, can’t reporters and members of Congress bring themselves to utter the word “nuclear”?
For one, the prospect of nuclear war is utterly terrifying. A large enough exchange between two nuclear powers—the United States and Russia, for instance—could end life on Earth as we know it. Any explicit acknowledgement of the possibility that the United States might really, actually nuke Iran feels like a bad word—like by saying it, you might speak it into existence. But this fear goes hand-in-hand with a kind of complacency, a feeling that it could never really happen. This makes some amount of sense: The first and only instance of nuclear warfare was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since every “close call” in the 80 years since has been averted, it’s reasonable to assume that nuclear war is the exception rather than the rule. But it’s come close to happening more times than many people realize. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the most cited example of a nuclear close call, but there were many other Cold War conflicts—the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Yom Kippur War to name a few—that came perilously close to escalating to all-out nuclear warfare. That’s not even mentioning the literally dozens of near-catastrophic nuclear accidents, like one incident in 1961 where a B-52 broke up midair and dropped two 3.8 megaton bombs over North Carolina. The disturbing truth is that our historical timeline may be the lucky one.
It’s also tempting to wax philosophical about nuclear war, to the point that worrying about “the bomb” almost sounds cliché. But whatever the prospect of nuclear war might say about existence, evil, free will, etc. etc., it would be a mistake to draw overly broad conclusions about humanity in general from the bomb. Out of the 200-ish sovereign states on Earth, only nine have nuclear capabilities. But even these nine possess nuclear weapons for a wide variety of reasons. As Trump’s threat made clear, for the United States, nukes are just another muscle to flex, a means to bully opponents into submission through fear of annihilation. But for a country like North Korea, nuclear weapons serve as a guarantee of survival against American aggression. The same goes for Iran—provided the Iranian regime is able to weather the current war, you can be sure that the first item on its agenda will be the development of a nuclear program to deter similar acts of aggression from the United States and Israel in the future. Of course, I hope for a day when nuclear weapons no longer exist—I want to live, you know? But nuclear weapons are ultimately a symptom of a far more deeply-rooted problem. Today, it seems all we can do is to hope that cooler heads prevail—for Iran’s sake, and for ours.
