Climate Action & Nuclear Zombies
In The News: Iran War Highlights That Nuclear Threats Are Existential Once Again
The Threat From Nuclear Zombies Just Won’t Die
So why did Mr. Trump start the criminal war with Iran in the first place? There have been all kinds of shifting rationales floated by Trump & Co. But one has remained constant: to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The Iran War has brought into sharp relief an old existential threat that continues to rear its ugly head. Nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation, and the real threat that such weapons could be used are now once again haunting our reality around the globe.
Nuclear Zombies.
Here’s a quick snapshot.
North Korea’s April 19 ballistic missile tests, banned by the UN, which continues an acceleration of advances and testing of both missiles and nukes, including one that could reach the US. The Iran War has most likely quickened North Korea’s pace to add to its already substantial nuclear arsenal and made them even more essential.
Putin’s nuclear saber rattling related to his criminal war against Ukraine — and the Ukraine war itself, which some may conclude wouldn’t have happened if Ukraine hadn’t relinquished the nukes they had from when they were a part of the former USSR.
Continual tensions and armed skirmishes between nuclear powers India and Pakistan that have been recently heightened.
The lapsing in February of New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the last active nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the US; nothing now holds each country back from creating a new nuclear arms race.
And now the Iran War’s two-pronged danger: Mr. Trump’s veiled threat to use nuclear weapons to destroy Iran, and; the likelihood that Iran will pursue nuclear weapons, which now they can do quickly, regardless of whether or not they strike some kind of deal with Trump.
These Nuclear Zombies just won’t die.
Ugh. We don’t get to pick the time in which we live. If we did, there might be a long queue to get the heck outta here.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
―J.R.R. Tolkien,The Fellowship of the Ring
But as Gandalf counseled Frodo, while we can’t choose our time, we can choose how to live in it. Our hope lies in using our three forms of power — moral power, people power and staying power — to answer these threats.
In the US We’ve Gone From Reagan’s Dream to the Nightmare of Donald Trump
“I have a dream. I have a dream of a world without nuclear weapons. I want our children and grandchildren particularly to be free of these weapons.” — President Ronald Reagan
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” — Donald Trump, threatening Iran
When I was a footsoldier in the Nuclear Freeze Campaign in the 1980s Ronald Reagan was, frankly, our arch-nemesis. He seemed to us a walking, talking destabilizing factor between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, the US and the USSR. He criticized the latest nuclear treaty called SALT II.
Early in his first term in a March 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, under a banner that said “Change Your World,” he called the USSR the “evil empire.”
His Administration’s strategy was to act tough and outspend the Soviets. At one point in August 1984 he quipped, as a joke:
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
It seemed to reveal what Reagan really felt.
But historians have demonstrated that from the very beginning Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist, starting after the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a vision he never surrendered.
For years I never thought I’d say this, but oh, for the days of Ronald Reagan! Mr. Trump, the anti-Reagan, has me pinning for those good old days.
We have gone from Reagan’s dream to the nightmare of Trump.
Alas, Reagan’s dream never came to pass. The fruits of Ronald Reagan’s nuclear diplomacy and his vision of a world without nuclear weapons have, sadly, died on the vine. The crowning outcome of his nuclear diplomacy, the START treaties, are no more. The New START nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired on February 5, 2026, removing the last legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
Today we find ourselves in a much less stable world where Mr. Trump issues veiled threats to use nuclear weapons to destroy Iran:
Mr. Trump’s Narcissism Is Why We’re In This Mess
It is Mr. Trump’s narcissism that has gotten us into this mess. Because he believes he always can make a better deal, he trashed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 that took two years to negotiate, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This was an hard-fought, serious agreement between Iran and the US, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany and the European Union or EU. It required Iran to limit its nuclear program—dismantling much of it and increasing inspection access—in exchange for major sanctions relief. Already suspicious and mistrustful of the US, this has made Iran even more so.
So the world had a deal to limit peacefully Iran’s nuclear program, but Trump and his arrogance knee-capped it. Since then Iran’s ability to create nuclear bombs has accelerated.
In 2022, a senior Iranian nuclear scientist and nuclear-hawk, Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri, confirmed, according to an Atlantic Council post, that
Tehran can speed up uranium enrichment to 99 percent, build a nuclear warhead, and use it as both “deterrence” and a bargaining chip in interactions with the West “like North Korea,” which, according to him, gets away with “bullying” the world.
Where Does Trump’s Dangerous and Deadly Arrogance Leave Us?
The sheer narcissistic arrogance, stupidity, and destructivity of the Iran War is on full display day after day.
The war has killed Iran’s old hardline leadership and replaced it with a younger one that is even more hardline, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now has even more clout. Because it’s rally around the leader time: (1) the regime has been able to crack down even more on the resistance, and; (2) the patriotism of government critics has even many of them supporting the regime during the war.
The war pushed Iran into a corner to play one of its few remaining cards, an “In Emergency Break Glass” kinda situation — asserting control and closing the Straight of Hormuz, wreaking economic havoc across the world.
Even with a temporary cease-fire the economic repercussions of the still-closed Straight continue to reverberate throughout the world economy. For example, according to the New York Times in a piece on the Asia-Pacific (April 20):
“Even if there is a peace deal soon, the future of this industrious region that has driven global economic growth for decades will likely include months of canceled flights, surging food prices, factory pauses, delayed shipments and empty shelves for products long considered quick and easy to buy worldwide: plastic bags, instant noodles, vaccines, syringes, lipstick, microchips and sportswear.
Collectively, according to many officials and experts, if the war’s strangling of commercial traffic through the Middle East lasts for even a few more weeks, and uncertainty lingers, shortages could push several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession.”
The International Monetary Fund or IMF now projects slower growth, but Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is worried the Iran War could lead to a global recession.
And of course in the US there’s the Trump-inflicted inflation, beginning with his vindictive tariffs and now thanks to Trump’s criminal Iran War the increased price of oil products, most visibly the cost of a gallon of gas. As a result, US Consumer Sentiment is at its lowest ever recorded.
Now all eyes are focused on the closed Straight and how to get it open again.
The biggest complicating factor in reaching a deal may be the mistrust Iran has with Trump, for launching the war while negotiations were ongoing, scuttling the earlier nuclear agreement (JCPOA), and his history of reneging on earlier deals large and small.
Some are suggesting that Iran’s newfound control of the Straight of Hormuz and the power that represents could potentially ease their need for nuclear weapons. But a more likely scenario is they will see the need for them, or at least the threat of developing them, as even more important.
“There are a lot of reasons to believe that the [Iranian] regime coming out the other side of this may have more incentives to covertly race for the bomb” said Christine Wormuth, President of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
On Friday Trump said Iran had agreed to turn over their “nuclear dust.” The Iranians said he made the whole thing up. He can’t bully or lie his way out of this war. He can’t go in and take their nuclear material without a massive troop presence and the potential for heavy casualties. And now he’s pushed them into controlling the Straight.
So if you’re the hardline Iranian regime, why settle for bullying the world with the Straight, when you can also do so with nuclear weapons like North Korea does? Why not pretend to give something to Trump nuclear-wise, get a bunch of concessions in return they would have never gotten pre-war, and all the while have a secret program to produce nukes?
So to sum up: Trump, Mr.-Art-of-the-Deal, skuttles the deal to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, then starts a criminal war to deal with the resulting accelerating nuclear program, then issues a veiled threat to use nuclear weapons to push Iran to reopen the Straight of Hormuz that was closed because of the war he started. And, of course, we don’t yet know what concessions Iran will wring out of Trump to reopen the Straight and (pretend?) to put on hold their nuclear weapons program.
More broadly, this current Nuclear Zombie time makes nuclear proliferation much more likely, given the extinction of the last remaining nuclear treaty between the US and Russia and a possible new arms race, the Iran War with its veiled nuclear threats by the US, and what happened to Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, nations without nuclear weapons who were attacked. All of this may lead other countries without nukes to feel they need them.
As one analysis put it:
There is a danger that many states watching these developments will absorb a straightforward message: nuclear weapons deter attack in a way that conventional capabilities cannot.
So Where’s The Hope?
Climate change, and now you pile on nuclear zombies. Where’s the hope amidst these two existential threats?
We are the hope — and here’s how. We must:
stay focused on achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything;
become big and broad and active enough, our first characteristic/imperative/goal— 5% of the population or 400 million worldwide and 16 million in the US by 2030;
lend our support at strategic moments to efforts to diminish and eliminate these nuclear threats.
It’s the combination of our three forms of power — moral power, people power, staying power — that will allow us to make a difference with these nuclear challenges while we simultaneously stay focused on climate change.
The need is great. The opportunity to make a difference together is profound. To realize this opportunity you can join what will become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world as we make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!
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