Things Undone

I hate this.

Something that isn’t much talked about is the opportunity cost of electing Donald Trump. There are plenty of things to deal with more immediately, like the prospect of of mass deportations. I’m going to talk about what we can’t do because we will be dealing with the attempt at mass deportations and whatever else bubbles to the top of Trump’s mind and the agendas of his court.

In particular, I’ll focus on what I had planned to do. Maybe I can salvage something.

The problem where the opportunity cost is most obvious is global warming. Not only will actions fail to be taken, but there may be active reversal of what’s been done. Some of that has to do with markets, which will be less easy to stop, although a 60% tariff on Chinese goods might even mess with that.

Forward thinking about nuclear weapons and foreign policy has been slipping away for some time. The immediate need to respond to Russia’s desire to reconstitute its empire has been responsible for a lot of that, although another factor is the sense in the 1990s that a nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR was no longer a problem. Global warming displaced nuclear weapons as the source of anxiety about the end of the world.

But as long as they are there, they can be used. And the arms control structure built up through decades was wiped away, largely by George W. Bush and Trump. Four years of a president who didn’t tweet gave some space for thinking.

I came up with two big themes:

• Rethinking the concept of deterrence
• Following through on Carol Cohn’s program of considering the gendered thoughtforms applied to nuclear weapons

The two interact, and there are many sub-headings. I may go into that in a later post.

But now the priorities shift. I’m seeing panicky posts on social media about nuclear proliferation to additional countries. I’ll try to write a post about that soon. For now, I’ll say that this is not an immediate danger. But I am sure that conversations have taken place in many governments.

Then there is the question of exactly how dangerous it is to have the nuclear satchel (“football”) in Trump’s hands. In this, as in many things, Trump has given off signals in two directions. The way he has expressed one of them lately is along the lines of “Global warming is a sham. What we need to worry about is nuclear warming [sic].” He then goes into comments on nuclear war. His historical comments often indicate that he is very concerned about nuclear war and would like to be seen as the peacemaker who abolished nuclear weapons. His comments also indicate that he has a very poor understanding of nuclear weapons, both in strategy and in their physical manifestation.

On the other side of his mind, he has mused about the power of nuclear weapons and tweeted nuclear threats at Iran and North Korea. His advisors will uniformly be hawkish and desire to brandish that ultimate power.

The US and other nuclear powers are in the process of updating their nuclear arsenals. This is another area I’ve written a bit about already. These programs are immensely expensive and potentially dangerous in making smaller nuclear weapons that might not be distinguishable in flight from conventional weapons.

Again, Trump doesn’t understand this program or its implications. But some of the people working for him are eager to experience a nuclear test and to stockpile more and more of these weapons. Those are things I’ll probably write about.

I won’t stop thinking about deterrence and gender, but the more immediate concerns are what I’m more likely to write about.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner