Over the last several months, President Donald Trump has repeatedly posted an image of himself firing nuclear weapons at Earth from a spaceship — including a post on Instagram and a post on his Truth Social account. In a commentary published by Alternet, forensic and social psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee and physician Dr. Ira Helfand argue that the posts point to a deeper danger: the authority to launch a nuclear war capable of killing billions and destroying human civilization is concentrated in the hands of a single individual.

According to the authors, a handful of people in nine countries currently hold that power. In the United States, it is concentrated in the president, who holds sole and unchecked authority to order a nuclear launch — an arrangement dating to the earliest years of the nuclear age that has never required approval from Congress, the courts, or the military before a lawful launch order is carried out. No one should ever possess such power, they write, but the danger becomes especially acute when the officeholder has repeatedly demonstrated that he is impulsive, vindictive, delusional, and profoundly lacking in basic human empathy.

The arsenal Trump currently controls includes roughly 1,700 deployed nuclear warheads, most with an explosive force of 100 to 800 kilotons — six to 50 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to figures compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. Those figures are tallied under New START, the last remaining treaty limiting U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals; Russia suspended its participation in 2023, and the pact is set to expire in February 2026, which would leave the world’s two largest nuclear forces without verified limits for the first time since the early 1970s. The authors warn that a large-scale attack on Russia could kill more than 100 million people in the first afternoon, and that a Russian counterattack would kill at least as many people in the United States.

Those who survived the initial fires and explosions would find themselves in a wasteland stripped of everything needed to sustain life. There would be no electric grid, no cell phones, no internet, no food distribution system, no means of delivering gasoline, natural gas, or heating oil, and no law and order. In the months following the attacks, most of those initial survivors would also die — from starvation, epidemic disease, radiation sickness, and exposure to the elements.

Nor would the catastrophe be confined to the United States and Russia. Smoke from the burning cities of both countries would loft enormous quantities of smoke into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and dropping average global temperatures by 18 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War’s Nuclear Famine report. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia, temperatures would fall by 45 to 50 degrees, food production would plummet, and the vast majority of humanity would starve. In the first two years alone, three-quarters of the world’s population — 6 billion people — would die.

Decisions by ‘gut instinct’

The authors argue that Trump’s conduct makes him uniquely unsuited to that authority. He has bragged that he makes decisions based on his “gut instinct.” Defending that approach in a 2018 interview, he said, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody’s brain can ever tell me.” The stakes of that decision-making style are compressed by time itself: intercontinental missiles can travel between Russia and the United States in roughly half an hour, leaving only minutes for deliberation once a launch is detected. In their view, the consequences have already played out disastrously in the Iran War, where the initial decision to launch the attack appeared to lack any coherent goals, any plan for achieving those goals, or any backup plan if things went wrong — for example, if the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s explosive personal attacks on journalists who question him are well known, the authors note, as are his repeated attempts to use the Department of Justice to imprison people who disagree with him publicly. More worrisome still, they write, are his thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons against Iran after it refused his demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

A documented pattern

Given the unprecedented torrent of false statements Trump has made, the authors acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to know when he is willfully lying and when he genuinely believes the misinformation he is spreading. But they contend that he does appear to believe he won the 2020 presidential election, despite irrefutable evidence that he did not, and that he has engaged in sustained political activity grounded in that belief.

Trump’s ad hominem attacks, usually accompanied by a crude nickname for the target of his displeasure, are a staple of his public life, they observe. In their assessment, his indifference to human suffering and his disregard for human life are exemplified by the extralegal executions of people on boats he claims may be transporting drugs, and, on a far grander scale, by his support for the war crimes being committed in Gaza and his indifference to the even greater crimes being committed in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A call for disarmament

There are no “right hands” in which nuclear weapons can rest, the authors conclude. But they argue that Trump clearly represents “wrong hands” and should be lawfully removed from an office that gives him the power to destroy humanity. The United States, they add, should actively work for the elimination of all nuclear weapons — not as a distant vision, but as an urgent national security priority. Their appeal lands at a moment of broader alarm: in January 2025, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever come to midnight, citing nuclear weapons among the leading dangers.

Dr. Ira Helfand is a past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and serves as co-president of the group’s global federation, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

Dr. Bandy Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist and a world expert on violence taught at Yale Law School for 17 years while on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine, before joining the Harvard Medical School faculty, where she remained until 2024. She currently devotes her time to a number of policy-oriented think tanks, both in the United States and abroad.