# Trump dreams of a Maga empire – but he’s more likely to leave us a nuclear hellscape

I in 1965, the British government blocked the BBC from broadcasting The War Game,  it had commissioned depicting just what a nuclear attack on the UK would entail. The film, the government judged, was simply too “horrifying” for the public. Two decades after that, The War Game finally aired, prior to the release of the 1984 film Threads, which, in imagining  on the UK, was the first movie to deal with the scientific reality of nuclear winter.

When I was 11, I had nightmares for a few weeks after seeing a trailer for a nuclear doomsday film () that ran prior to a cinema screening of The Fellowship of the Ring (I had just read the three Lord of the Rings volumes). The  were disturbing, of course, but they were not of the real world, unlike nukes. This January, I was confronted with The War Game at an exhibition on The Atomic Age at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art; I finished the exhibit in near silence. A week later, I watched Threads; it ruined the remainder of my afternoon.

Both films are the bleakest things I have ever seen – enough to induce nightmares in any adult. It is fitting that words fall short of the power of their imagery in revealing the pointless atrocity that would end healthcare, agriculture and even language itself for the mentally ruined, deformed, illiterate generations that would linger on, subsisting through a collective non-life.

During the cold war, the world narrowly escaped that fate . Among the near misses, two are particularly harrowing. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, , a senior officer on a Soviet submarine, averted nuclear conflict after his two fellow commanders thought non-lethal depth charges exploding around them were the outbreak of war. In 1983, the Soviet officer  refused to believe that a launch warning flashing on a radar system was actually an American first strike, and simply decided not to report the incident up the chain of command.

A decade later in 1994 Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world,  as part of a complete nuclear disarmament. It did so  from the US, UK and Russia. Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine (or, worse, active sabotage by cutting it off from some ) and in-process realignment of the US with Vladimir Putin’s geostrategic objectives guarantees that no state will ever do anything similar in the future.

For months,  have shown quite clearly what the Trump regime’s vision of the world is, and what its intent is. It’s a vision Trump has made little effort to conceal. As if they were playing the board game Risk, they have decided that the “winning strategy” is to take and hold North America. The first economic shot has been launched at forcibly making Canada the “51st state” – and during his address to the US Congress, Trump was equally explicit that Greenland (“”) and the  will be next.




*   Alexander Hurst is a Guardian  columnist

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