A Nuclear Threat?

 Trump's threat yesterday to destroy the "whole civilization" of Iran, unless they agreed to his terms for a ceasefire deal, was many things. It was genocidal, for one. If Trump had actually followed through on his threats in a way that had killed or erased a lot of civilian targets, a statement like that would meet anyone's definition of the "intent" requirement under the Genocide Convention. 

But was it an implied threat of nuclear annihilation, specifically? I didn't read it that way. I interpreted it as a characteristically (though evilly and irresponsibly) hyperbolic restatement of Trump's earlier threats to attack bridges, power plants, and other civilian infrastructure in Iran (which would be a war crime in any case, even if no nuclear weapons were involved—so I hardly mean to absolve Trump for any of this). 

Nor did I regard this as a "bluff," since the U.S. and Israel have already repeatedly struck civilian targets in the last month of this war—including universities, dormitories, children's schools, and bridges. I saw Trump as perfectly capable of deliberately killing noncombatants. Has he not repeatedly demonstrated his indifference to civilian life elsewhere? (Viz. the Caribbean Sea.)

I spent much of the day yesterday dreading reports of more civilian casualties, then; but still, I didn't picture it coming in the form of nuclear armageddon. I didn't have one eye on the clock all day, wondering if at 8 PM ET the White House was going to set in motion the forces that would end human civilization. I wasn't really thinking of that as a potential outcome. 

But maybe I should have been. Many other informed observers interpreted Trump's threat as a nuclear one. Nate Silver has a piece out this morning, for instance, arguing that that's exactly what it was. "It was a little bit ambiguous," he conceded—"but nuclear threats usually are."

And even if Trump didn't exactly have nuclear armageddon on the brain yesterday (and the White House reportedly disavowed that Trump was talking about nukes, even before his self-imposed deadline)—the fact that he put them on the table for serious discussion in this way is already a loss to human civilization. "[N]uclear escalation had entered the realm of the thinkable," Silver writes, "and that’s bad enough."

Trump really did bring us within cognizable distance yesterday, then, of a "first strike" use of nuclear weapons in war. He put us back amidst the "chafe and jar/ of nuclear war"—to quote Robert Lowell—in a way we haven't been since the height of the Cold War, when Lowell wrote his poem. He went on: 

Our end drifts nearer,

the moon lifts,

radiant with terror.

And wait! Wasn't yesterday, paradoxically, also the day of "moon joy"? The day when our Artemis II astronauts circled our lunar neighbor? Many people seeing those images yesterday of the far side of the moon experienced only cosmic awe. But perhaps it should have been mixed "with terror," as Lowell puts it. While our cosmic travelers watched the moon—back here on Earth we were perhaps 90 minutes away from nuclear midnight.