Madmen for President?

One of my conspecifics said something shocking to me. He said that the president of the US should never declare the use of nuclear weapons “off the table”, that to do so would be “naïve”. Evidently, it is important for the rest of the world to think that the president is crazy as hell and itching to unleash destruction on a massive scale at the slightest provocation. This is supposed to make us “safer” than a world in which the president can be assumed to be a rational actor and subject to some rudimentary moral guidelines.

I don’t see how the perception of the US as led by a madman helps make me any safer. On the contrary, that just provides incentives for the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their early use. I want countries, including the US, to disarm, not build up vast arsenals, and to work to reduce the likelihood of a global catastrophe. That would make me safer, and I wouldn’t have to pay for the damned weapons.

At a minimum, a presidential candidate should be willing to declare the use of nuclear weapons “off the table” in most circumstances. For example, can we agree that the use of nuclear weapons on domestic targets would be “off the table”? We won’t want to use nukes to combat illegal immigration or to engage in the “War on Drugs”. We don’t want to use nukes to target criminal or terrorist suspects, no matter where they are, because that would be all out of proportion to the object and would inflict gratuitous collateral damage. A candidate’s itchy nuclear trigger finger really should be a disqualification for office.

For the president as madman ploy to be effective, the president must be plausibly mad, and the public can’t know whether they are getting a candidate playing at madness or one who is actually mad. In fact, the adoption of the president as madman ploy is, in my view, a manifestation of a severe deficit in reasoning capacity and a sure sign that the candidate really is a monster.