Kim Jong Un & Donald J. Trump: Buttons, Tweets, Potency, and Apocalypse

"North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the 'Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.' Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!" — Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, 2 January 2018

This is the way the world ends*
(For many humans, and other species);
This is how the world ends
(Worse goes to worst,
"Depending on the breaks"),
This is why the world ends:
From a tweet* and a brag,
And measuring 

Symbolic cocks.

                                    * With thanks to Jeffrey Weinstock (well, and T.S. Eliot and Gen. "Buck" Turgidson)

The Congress of the United States needs to write us a bit of law renouncing the current U.S. doctrine of First Use (nuclear) and restricting the power of the U.S. President to use nukes for anything but proportionate retaliation. I'd also add a provision that in case of nuclear "exchange," the duty station of the Commander-in-Chief is wherever s/he might be, and forbidding spending any money to move the President to safety. If a President gets us into a nuclear war, the very least s/he can do is to get killed in the first exchange.

And on this utterly depressing, apocalyptic subject, I'll pass along the suggestion from a couple or three decades back that the final part of the launch codes should not be in the "football" that accompanies the President but near the heart in the chests of the people carrying the football, and, of course, carrying also a knife. To launch the missiles [etc.], the President would have to cut open the chest of the attaché — the logic being that if the situation warrants a nuclear response, it justifies murdering a single person, and insisting that the murder be up-close, personal, and messy. The logic is that bombing and missile attacks are way too abstract all down the line and that a key part of initiating nuclear warfare should be a death with emotional power and deep-seated inhibitions. Perhaps, though, the code should be in the chest of the President, and s/he should have to order a high-ranking official to do the cutting. I am serious here, following Konrad Lorenz on the dangers of being able to kill at distances that reduce inhibitions.

Trump: Tweets, Basic Calendar, Geography ... and the Next Dark Age

On 8 August 2017, President Trump threatened North Korea "with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before." The 8th of August falls between the 6th of August, the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and 9 August, the bombing of Nagasaki. So whatever Mr. Trump intended to say, in that context of basic calendar what he did say was a threat against North Korea of "fire and fury" exceeding two smallish atomic bombs, a degree of "fire and fury" that would require a hydrogen bomb or several substantial fission bombs.

On 19 September 2017, in a prepared speech to the United Nations, Mr. Trump claimed great patience for the US but "if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," presumably referring to destroying the Democratic Republic of North Korea as a functioning state but possibly meaning more — although it's hard to conceive of what that "more" could be unless he was thinking of North Korea as its human population (ca. 25.4 million people) and was threatening genocide, or had some idea that North Korea as a geographical entity could be destroyed by military action.

Whether the President of the United States on his own may legally order preventive genocide or even just state destruction by very-high high explosives is a question I now submit to readers expert in the law, but I will move from the initial calendar issue to a point from maps.

The City Distance website saith that Pyongyang, DPRK, is 684 km / 425 miles from Vladivostok in the Russian Federation, as the crow flies or fallout drifts, and about 810 km / 503 miles from Bejing, China. The Chinese border city of Dandong is about an even 100 miles from Pyongyang, 161 km; Dangong's population varies by how one defines the city, but just under a million people would give a fair idea.

It's not entirely clear how the governments of China and Russia would react to North Korea's being reduced — totally — to radioactive glass, but China has made it clear that it doesn't want to deal with large numbers of North Korean refugees, which would result from anything short of literal genocide; and it is a safe bet that both Russia and China would be very upset with radioactive fallout falling out on their territories, plus smoke, toxic gasses, and maybe a short-term nuclear winter or other climate change, including long-term warming.

Perhaps Mr. Trump should consider his reaction if China practiced some very hard-nose capitalism-by-other-means and nuked all Mexican maquiladoras 100 miles (161 km) or so south of the Rio Grande. Or he should consider Air Force General Buck Turgidson's description of Russian reaction upon seeing on their radar a wing of US B-52's entering their airspace: "[T]hey are going to go absolutely ape, and they're gonna strike back with everything they've got."

Call me a pessimist and/or an old softy, but I believe the Congress of the United State should specify — immediately and by a veto-proof majority — that the President of the United States is authorized to go nuclear with a counterattack to a nuclear strike on the US and can use subnuclear means of a wide variety to preempt an imminent attack of significant danger to the Republic and/or to large numbers of Americans. BUT: No preventive wars or nuclear strikes, especially on the scale of genocide. Zip, none, nada; and an order for such a nuclear strike is illegal, to be disobeyed by all people under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and to result in the arrest of the Commander-in-Chief, as a person subject to the UCMJ.