Words themselves can be inherently dishonest. Perhaps the cardinal example relative to our times is “unthinkable,” trailed closely by its sibling, “unimaginable.”
Nothing is unthinkable. Saying it means we are already thinking it, however unwillingly or inadequately.
Everything created or destroyed by human beings is all too thinkable, even if its advent blindsides everyone but the first-off-the-mark visionary. Was the Holocaust unthinkable, just because we claim it to have been so? The “Final Solution” proposed by Hitler shocked even his most zealous antisemitic intimates. But they soon adjusted.
Was it truly unthinkable that U.S. troops would be tied down in Afghanistan for two decades? Not to our enemies, who had timetables and minds of their own.
In this untrusting age of conspiracy mongering, was it truly unthinkable that tens of millions of our fellow citizens would turn on scientific inquiry and shun genuinely miraculous medicines?
Is it unthinkable, then, that a frustrated, fickle American president might strike an exemplary target with a nuclear weapon in a desperate effort to persuade a strong-willed foe that resistance is futile?
One need not think it probable to recognize that it exists conceptually at the far reaches of possibility. Or perhaps not so far.
However slight the chance of such a performative act by a president, should we simply close the curtains and agree, comfortably, that that show will not go on? We are in a war with global consequences that seems to have been ordered on a whim and a merry assumption or two. And now U.S. Marines are on their way to Iranian territory—until recently “unthinkable.”
Might it not be time to finally think the unthinkable? Just in case?
Were an American president to order the use of a nuclear weapon against a symbolic target in Iran, what—or of greater relevance, who—would stop him? By what authority? By what means? In today’s self-harming political environment, there appear to be those who would obey any presidential order, without a Wannsee Conference to condition them for the special purpose.
Would the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff question the order’s lawfulness? Would the service chiefs or the relative chains of command? For a moment, set aside the reassuring fail-safe mechanisms we imagine would interrupt the madness. Think that unthinkable thought. Do not, ever, assume that someone in Washington or a bunker in the upper Midwest is going to save us in that made-for-Hollywood moment.
And what if that nuclear demonstration failed to convince Iran’s all-or-nothing regime to quit?
Might the rollicking little war envisioned by a president with the ostensible goal of halting an enemy’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons program ironically trigger the first nuclear-weapons use in anger since 1945? And by the United States?
To update our strategic vocabulary, any mention of the Pax Americana would be “cringe.”
The unthinkable is most apt to prove real when those who should be thinking about it don’t.
