Trump hasn’t learned from history and people of Guam may pay for it

With the news that Guam is issuing safety tips in case of a nuclear attack, we’ve time traveled to the early 1950s when government authorities worried more about panic in the wake of a nuclear attack than they did the end of the world. When I teach this time period, my students and I have a good laugh by watching the short, instructional film “Duck and Cover” in which a cartoon turtle tells students what to do when an atomic flash lights the sky. The people of Guam are having to take such advice seriously because President Trump is dangerously ignorant of history.

The “Duck and Cover” period was short-lived. By the late 1950s, the U.S- and the USSR had developed hydrogen bombs capable of being carried by long-range missiles, and any type of nuclear exchange became unthinkable. Public discussion of the possibility of limited nuclear war or surviving a nuclear exchange met with severe rebuke. One reviewer of Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War (1960), which discussed planning for nuclear war, accused him of plotting mass murder.

{mosads}President Reagan revived nuclear brinkmanship by pushing for SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), a fanciful idea for a weapons system that could shoot down incoming missiles. Conservatives today say it was a smart negotiating ploy, but Reagan was willing to let talks with Gorbachev potentially fail in 1986 rather than give up SDI. Republicans learned the wrong lesson from Reagan: more important than the atmosphere of nuclear fear he created in the 1980s was Reagan’s willingness to make significant cuts to our atomic arsenal in his tête-à-têtes with the Soviets.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we learned how close the world had actually come to nuclear oblivion during the Cold War, especially in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was even worse than Americans, including our government, had known. It wasn’t just missiles that Cuba had by November 1962; some of those missiles were armed with nukes, and Fidel Castro was itching to use them on Florida. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, however, decided to retain authority over Cuba’s Soviet missiles and refused Castro’s demands.

Our image of Khrushchev is of a slightly crazed dictator who once banged his shoe on a podium while railing against the United States. But it was Khrushchev who backed down during the crisis. For JFK’s part, we know from secret recordings made of his meetings during the crisis that his advisors wanted a stronger response than a blockade. Invasion or air strikes were the preferred means of retaliation. JFK stood up to his advisors, and the blockade, which felt like nuclear brinkmanship to some Americans at the time, turned out to be the right level of escalation.

Apart from Kennedy’s leadership in a crisis, the U.S. government tried various tactics involving nuclear threats. During the late 1940s, the United States was the only nation that had nuclear bombs, but we were unable to use it to our advantage when negotiating with the Soviet Union over the future of Eastern Europe.

President Eisenhower’s massive retaliation policy in the 1950s again overplayed our hand; threatening to use nuclear weapons in response to any communist aggression anywhere didn’t end the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The nuclear bomb was such a powerful weapon that it couldn’t be used rhetorically without dangerously escalating a limited situation to a global war.

The lesson for us is how much individual leadership mattered during a time when a conflict between two nations threatened to engulf the entire world. Fortunately for the world, nuclear-empowered leaders during the Cold War never gave into the temptation to use nuclear weapons. Our luck may run out with the current president, who lives only in the present and has shown a shocking ignorance of history. He seems to think that no one has ever thought to use nuclear threats against a potential aggressor before.

Trump is also repeating our troubling history of military intervention in Asia. It is significant that he is threatening North Korea with “fire and fury,” even though North Korea hasn’t attacked us. And our own arrogant decisions to invade smaller countries who defy us helped spark Kim Jong Un’s quest for nuclear weapons as a safeguard against invasion.

Scholars have asked themselves whether Americans would have used nuclear weapons on Germany, a white Christian nation, had it not already surrendered by July 1945, when the bomb was finally ready. Racism was a dimension of the Pacific War as historians have shown, most notably in John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986). Trump’s rhetoric, the same week as the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, evokes that ugly history.

Trump’s historical and scientific illiteracy in relation to North Korea and the environment is proof that we should no longer depend on the character of the occupants of the White House to prevent the apocalypse. Just as cities are grabbing the initiative on climate change, Congress needs to limit the power of the executive branch, beginning with curtailing his power to order a nuclear first-strike.

Lisa Vox is a historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of “Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era.”

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.