Let’s face it: Donald Trump should be considered an atomic bomb of a president—potentially all too literally, even if in slow motion, thanks to climate change. When it comes to actual atomic weaponry, he’s been threatening for a while first to restart the testing of nuclear weapons, which the US stopped 33 years ago, and then (at least implicitly) to use just such a weapon against the Iranians. In April, in fact, he insisted that, if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back”—only to later deny that he meant he would ever consider using an atomic weapon against that country.

Of course, once upon a time in school (think the 1950s), the young Donald Trump, like me, must have “ducked and covered“ under his desk in preparation for a potential Soviet atomic attack on our city (New York). During those Cold War years, of course, atomic testing was considered normal, while our country and the Soviet Union were indeed facing off globally in a remarkably threatening fashion. But no ducking and covering now, not from our president anyway.

Once upon a time, in the last century when I was an editor at Pantheon Books, I published Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. Then, at the invitation of the Japanese editor of that book, I actually visited Hiroshima and went to the museum there dedicated to my country’s nuclear devastation of that city and Nagasaki to end World War II. I’ll never forget that dead 12-year-old’s charred lunchbox or that human shadow etched in stone by the atomic blast. Of course, as a boy, I had all too typically grown up dreaming (in the sense of a nightmare) about mushroom clouds exploding over New York City.

But in all those years, I never quite imagined that there might be a slow-motion version of atomic warfare on this planet, which we’ve come to mildly label “climate change.” (It should, of course, be called something more like “climate catastrophe” or “climate hell.”) Nor had I ever quite imagined that we would elect a president seemingly intent on making it happen ever more quickly and severely. After all, he’s pushed remarkably hard to further fossil-fuelize our world. As Juan Cole noted all too aptly at his Informed Comment website, just as the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding was passing, “Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines makes him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle.”

When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities.

These days, of course, nine countries have nuclear arsenals (enough weapons to wipe out any number of Earth-sized planets), and Donald Trump has recently been at war with Iran, the country he feared might become the 10th. And yet, in the 80 years since my country ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people (including an estimated 38,000 children), consider it a miracle that another of those weapons (now horrifically more powerful) has never been used, although since the first nuclear test in 1945, there have been more than 2,000 other “tests” in which such weapons were exploded, which have, of course, sent cancer-causing........

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