CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

It’s Getting Hot, Hot, Hot!

Image by Immo Wegmann.

Before I truly begin, let me say one thing: It’s eternally unnerving to find myself writing so often about “our” president and so facing the fact (yet again!) that the American people elected such a man not just once but twice — someone mad enough to put significant effort into quite literally trying to destroy our planet (at least as we’ve known it).

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 U.S. 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........

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