There is a red button on Donald Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. When visitors are in the room, the President sometimes pauses mid-sentence, reaches over with deliberate ceremony, and presses it. The effect on first-timers is instantaneous, especially if Trump is mad about something. One or two faces might flash a look of alarm. Oh no, what did he decide to do? Then a butler appears at the door, bearing a Diet Coke on a silver tray. Trump grins. He’s always enjoyed that particular prop — the big red button — which he even has installed on an elevated wooden platform.
That sort of symbolism might be funny to some. Until it isn’t.
This week, a former CIA analyst claimed that during a tense Situation Room confrontation over Iran, Trump demanded access to the nuclear codes and had to be physically confronted by his most senior military adviser before backing down. The story has not yet been independently confirmed, and the White House has denied it. But anyone who spent time inside the first Trump administration will tell you that the account, whether or not it is literally true, is psychologically credible.
Trump’s fascination with nuclear weapons is very real. When he wields the threat of dropping a nuke or wiping out an entire civilisation, he’s not deploying a negotiating tactic under the cloak of bravado. He’s doing something far more unsettling. He’s being himself.
Before he even took office for the first time, Trump was peppering his advisers with questions about why the United States didn’t more regularly use nuclear weapons. During his presidential transition, he demanded that more be done to “expand [US] nuclear capability”. When a journalist confronted him with concerns that this could spark an arms race, he had this to say: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
As I have written before in these pages, Trump’s first term brought the United States closer to a nuclear exchange than the world ever realised. At one point, his defence chief warned my team to prepare the home front for attack, as if war was imminent. Trump had told advisers he genuinely wanted to strike North Korea with a nuke, so at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we held emergency sessions on strike scenarios against the US homeland, sessions we had never needed to conduct in the department’s history.
How disinterested was Trump in the nuclear threat his own behaviour had created? On the day North Korea test-launched a nuclear-capable missile in November 2017 — one that ripped through the skies before breaking apart and crashing into the ocean off the coast of Japan — I raced back to DHS headquarters to find our acting secretary underground in a secure facility, shaken. She wasn’t rattled by the missile specifically. She was rattled by the President’s apparent lack of concern.
Trump had called while the launch was still being assessed. But his subject was not the ICBM. It was the border. He wanted to know why DHS hadn’t deported more people. A nuclear-armed regime had just tested a weapon capable of reaching the American homeland (because of his escalatory tweets), and the President of the United States didn’t seem to care. He wanted to chat about deportations.
Thankfully, the President’s closest advisers found an “off ramp” for the North Korea debacle, and Trump began famously writing “love letters” to Kim Jong Un instead of dropping bombs. It was humiliating to see the leader of the free world grovel to one of the most brutal despots on earth. But it was a lot better than nuclear apocalypse.
The President is known for enjoying toying with visitors by using the red button in his office to order Diet Coke from a butler (Photo: Reuters /Nathan Howard)Which is what makes the present moment so much more dangerous than the first. Trump hasn’t mellowed, and his team has only grown more accommodating toward his bluster. Indeed, he’s not absorbed the institutional dread that every prior nuclear-age president, of whatever party, eventually internalised: namely, the understanding that these weapons exist to deter, not to use. Their very possession demands restraint. For Trump, the bomb remains something else. He sees it as impressive, enticing and symbolic of a superpower he can wield over others.
Unfortunately, the theatre of confrontation is no longer a bilateral stand-off with a hermit kingdom. Trump has drawn the United States into a crisis involving, at minimum, two nuclear-armed states: America itself, Israel – which is widely understood to possess several dozen warheads — and Iran, a country that American and international intelligence assessments suggest holds enough fissile material to assemble as many as a dozen devices within a matter of weeks. Add to that the accelerating involvement of nuclear-armed Russia and China, and the geometry of escalation becomes terrifying.
But Trump’s nuclear flirtation does not have to culminate in a launch order to be catastrophic. It may already be doing damage of a different kind.
In his first term, the President badly wanted to resume nuclear testing but was talked out of it. No longer. Late last year, Trump ordered the United States military to resume nuclear weapons tests for the first time since the Cold War ended. The last American test detonation took place in 1992. The international norm against testing has been one of the quiet foundations of non-proliferation for more than three decades.
In the US national security community, many of us are now warning that American tests will give other nations the political cover and strategic incentive to resume their own programmes. Russia. China. Pakistan. India. North Korea. The architecture of restraint that has kept the world’s nuclear arsenals largely static since the end of the Cold War isn’t self-sustaining. It requires, above all, that the most powerful nation on earth treat it as worth preserving. Trump, on the other hand, treats it as worth disrupting.
To put it another way, Trump is the first American President since the start of the nuclear age without the disposition to keep such bombs from going off. Rather, he appears to have the opposite — a perverse and not-so-secret desire to make one go “boom”. And I very much believe that he’ll make that happen before he leaves office, even if it’s only a test.
A president who stumbles by accident into high-stakes nuclear brinksmanship is terrifying, to be sure, but he’s containable — by advisers, procedure and the chain of command. A president who deliberately dismantles the international norms that prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is doing something almost worse. In testing nukes, Trump would be challenging the rest of the world to do the same and making clear that possession of them is a nation’s only true insurance policy against destruction. He’s encouraging proliferation. He’s making future catastrophes more likely, more numerous and harder to prevent long after he has left office.
There’s a version of this story that ends with the Diet Coke arriving and everyone smiling. The button is pressed, the butler appears and the guests laugh with relief. But the joke depends on the red button being fake. What ought to concentrate minds — in Washington, in London, in every capital where serious people are watching this presidency — is that the other button is real, the man pressing it is not constrained by his advisers and the cloud that follows a real detonation will haunt the world forever.
Some jokes are only funny once.
Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader.
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