And in the mind of US president-elect Donald Trump? His intentions truly are secret, and our lack of certainty about them means his election makes it more likely that humanity will perish in a catastrophic event of some kind. That’s according to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, one of a handful of think-tanks around the world dedicated to the “existential risks” to mankind—in essence, to saving the human race from destroying itself.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—keeper of the Doomsday Clock, which was created in 1947 to illustrate how close we are to perishing in nuclear war—Baum said Trump’s “tendency toward erratic behavior, combined with a mix of difficult geopolitical challenges ahead, mean the probability of a nuclear launch order will be unusually high.” [...]
Amid the discussion of what it means that almost 63 million Americans voted for a man who has shown a lack of respect for democratic norms, such as hinting at “rigged” elections and vowing to jail his opponent, Baum also fears the possibility of an authoritarian, dictatorial United States of America under Trump. This has been a growing concern among many liberals as the election loomed—The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, wrote after Trump’s election (paywall), “Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.” [...]
In the case of Oppenheimer’s deadly invention, the only thing that could stop Trump from launching a nuclear missile is a key person in the chain of command refusing to follow the order. That was what happened in the case of Vasili Arkhipov at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, or Stanislav Petrov, who was the duty officer in a bunker near Moscow in 1983 when his computer falsely told him that the US had just launched four nukes at the Soviet Union. Petrov ignored the alarm.
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