Armageddon War: Will Trump Soon Bomb Iran with Nuclear Weapons?

JAKARTA — Donald Trump’s threats to destroy Iran could be described as the worst public statements he has made since returning to the White House.

This is not merely because his repeated remarks run deeply counter to moral principles and break the law — the deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime — but also because this kind of violent rhetoric could lead us towards global destruction. Its consequences would affect not only the Persian people, but all human civilisation.

Such rhetoric cannot be excused, justified or ignored. The only question worth asking is: what should we do about it?

Two experts offer an answer: Ivana Nikolić Hughes, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University and a member of the scientific advisory group for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; and Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Institute for Nuclear Studies at American University in Washington, DC.

In an article cited by Al Jazeera on Friday (16 October 2026), they explain that some well-intentioned people may wish to regard nuclear weapons as instruments that brought the Second World War to an end and have maintained peace ever since. The reality, however, is the opposite.

Nuclear weapons brutally killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and injured hundreds of thousands more.

Survivors endured illness and suffering for years, even decades. As we have written before, there were many alternatives for ending the war in 1945.

The false narrative that the atomic bombs prevented an invasion and saved lives has, in many ways, helped perpetuate the existence of nuclear weapons.

That narrative has increased the risks to humanity’s survival to a level that was previously difficult to imagine.

Presenting the bloody beginning of the nuclear age as something positive has made this issue more complicated, when it need not have been.