80 years after Hiroshima, Trump’s ‘gut’ is in charge of the nuclear codes, and it's dangerous

Eighty years ago today, the innocent ways of the world, or as innocent as they could be, blew up. At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb from the infamous plane the Enola Gay on Hiroshima.

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It wiped out the city, caused untold suffering, uncorked a new era of terror that lasts today, and established a reality that a bomb had the capacity to annihilate societies, countries, and even the world..

As we solemnly mark this anniversary in 2025, there is one person in the world, Donald Trump, perhaps the most dangerous person, who will just shrug it off or puff his chest. This day means nothing to him.

Trump is once again playing footsie with nuclear fire. But unlike Harry Truman, who wrestled with the horrific implications of dropping the bomb, Trump seems to see nuclear weapons as nothing more than oversized toys, pawns in his game of ego and chest-thumping..

I’ve long been fascinated by nuclear history and the Cold War. From watching Oppenheimer on repeat to devouring Cold War documentaries and books about how the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki dramatically flipped the course of history.

We are who we are today because of what happened in 1945. The bomb continues to fester anxiety at the highest levels, and in countries around the globe.

What always strikes me isn’t just how powerful these weapons are, but how often we've barely avoided catastrophe. One misread radar. One haunting surveillance image. One botched transmission. One too-proud leader. That's all it takes. Just one slip-up.

When the buttons were first pushed by Truman, it was in the name of peace. The next time a button is pushed it will be to start a war, and it will likely be the last time the button is ever pushed.

And now we have Trump. We used to fear that North Korea would lunatically go first, and we still do. We were whipped up in a frenzy earlier this year that Iran was close to being able to complete the weapon. So Trump brazenly bombed Iran, without considering the reverberations of that aggressive action or what would happen next.

He said Iran’s nuclear weapon capability was “obliterated.” It was not. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says Iran can still build the weapons, and only diplomacy will stop it. Do you think Iran would negotiate with Donald Trump? The most untrustworthy man in the world? Or that anybody else would?

Last week, Trump ordered nuclear submarines to reposition near Russian waters after a petty online insult from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Instead of acting like a statesman, Trump threw a temper tantrum like a child; however, this tantrum involved throwing not a toy into the mix but a lethal weapon.

That’s how wars start: not by design but by miscommunication, miscalculation, or, in this case, a bruised ego.

Trump “toying” around with nuclear weapons isn't something new. Even in his first campaign, he seemed disturbingly enamored of nuclear weapons. He repeatedly asked, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”

We were horrified then, and we are more horrified now, because by now we know how far gone Trump’s sanity is, and how off the charts his quest for power is. I’m sure Trump thinks he can just “drop” the bomb and walk away. Nuclear arms should not be run by a simpleton.

Without thinking, well, he’s never thinking, he babbles and boasts about proliferation, suggesting more countries, including Japan and South Korea, should get the bomb. He even said he wouldn’t rule out nuking Europe, “because it’s a big place.”

It’s like the argument about guns here in the U.S.:“More guns make us safer,” That phony slogan has been debunked many times. The same goes with nuclear weapons. If you put more nuclear weapons in more hands, you run the risk of more accidents and a better chance for Armageddon.

Now, in his second term, Trump’s nuclear fixation has only grown more reckless and more surreal. In just one day at the beginning of this week, there were two stunning developments.

On Monday, Russia withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty over alleged “direct threats” from NATO and Western missile deployments. Russia has lifted its moratorium on deploying short and medium-range nuclear missiles, the Foreign Ministry announced.

Russia blames NATO’s “anti-Russian policy.” Medvedev, now deputy head of Russia's Security Council, echoed the warning on X, saying, “This is a new reality all our opponents will have to reckon with. Expect further steps.”

He did not specify what those steps might be, but we can only assume that it’s saber-rattling in response to Trump’s deploying nuclear subs in Russia's neighborhood. It’s demagoguery like this that puts the world on a knife’s edge.

And on Monday, Trump’s acting NASA administrator, Sean Duffy, who is also the Transportation secretary, said he would announce plans to put nuclear reactors on the moon. The justification was to better compete with China. But can you imagine a nuclear producing facility on the moon?

And for what? Duffy wasn’t clear. And knowing Trump, he wants nukes on the moon in order to launch them right back here on Earth.

Ronald Reagan envisioned the science fiction of a “Star Wars” defense missile system in space. Trump is taking this fantasy to a whole other level, and then some. Trump isn’t content to militarize the Earth and blow it to smithereens; he also wants to destroy our galaxy or make some perverted history for himself.

But Trump isn’t a student of history. He likely has no clue what happened in Hiroshima 80 years ago or that 38,000 children were vaporized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He probably isn’t aware of the true terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was 16 years old in 1962 when it happened, so he was probably beginning to make sexually explicit comments to young girls, like the one that emerged this week, or tending to his bone spurs.

And he certainly has no grasp of the countless close calls since, moments when human error, false alarms, or technical failures nearly unleashed the apocalypse. Like a 1983 incident that was prevented only because a single Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, disobeyed protocol and held off on retaliating against a false U.S. attack warning.

There are dozens of these incidents that have been chronicled through Cold War history. They’re not science fiction. They’re grave reminders that we need a sober and literate person in charge.

And that’s the problem. Trump doesn’t do sober reflection or isn’t literate enough to read an actual history book. He does showmanship. He doesn't read briefing papers. He retaliates on a whim, not on intelligence, and he just shrugs his shoulders at experts and scientists.

He treats nuclear weapons like his tariff strategy. If he thinks he’s getting screwed over economically by a country, he jacks up tariffs to obscene amounts. If a leader of a country questions his manhood or U.S. military capability, he rattles on indiscriminately about nuclear war on Truth Social,and deploys nuclear subs.

No thought process. No strategy. Just his “gut.” And if you think about his “gut,” filled with french fries, double cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes, that “gut’ isn’t healthy enough to make any rational decisions, along with the empty head that goes along with it.

Nuclear war isn’t something to be bandied about. It’s doomsday and extinction, all wrapped up in a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world, even in a just limited detonation.

You know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Hundreds of thousands were killed. Skin melted off bones. Infrastructure disintegrated. And afterward, untold famine, radiation poisoning, collapse of society.

It’s what Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, tried to warn us about when he said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Trump has already withdrawn the U.S. from arms control treaties, gutted the State Department, elevated impulsive sycophants to national security roles, and put a dunce like Pete Hegseth in charge of the Defense Department..

Truman’s gut-wrenching decision to use the bomb changed the course of human history. It made us the keepers of our own demise. And that responsibility requires wisdom, a sharp sense of history, enormous restraint, and unbridled humility.

Trump has none of these qualities. Which is why, 80 years after Hiroshima, we are once again standing at the brink as an indifferent, nearly 80-year-old Trump dangles the lives of human beings over the abyss.

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