By Lawrence S. Wittner, World BEYOND War, November 15, 2026
Is there a connection between mental illness and nuclear weapons?
The behavior of Donald Trump―whose mental stability has long been questioned by psychologists and other mental health professionals―has called attention to this issue. In March and early April of this year, he threatened to launch massive military strikes against Iranian energy and nuclear infrastructure, proclaiming on April 5: “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” On April 7, he warned: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Addressing the UN General Assembly on September 22, Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran, saying that he could “drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future . . . generations.”
Assessing Trump’s UN diatribe, the Union of Concerned Scientists declared that it “constitutes an implied threat to use overwhelming nuclear force against Iran and the Iranian people”―a “nuclear genocide.”
Observers were aghast. U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump sounded like “a madman,” while Senator Bernie Sanders called Trump’s remarks “the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unstable person.” Referring to Trump’s rant on April 5, Senator Chris Murphy called it “absolute madness.” This May, 30 U.S. psychiatrists and other doctors specializing in mental health issued a statement declaring that Trump was mentally unfit to serve and warning that his ability to launch a nuclear weapons attack constituted a “danger” to the world. They noted, among other things, his “severely impaired judgment and impulse control,” “significant loss of self-control,” and “grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility.”
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has also been diagnosed, repeatedly, as suffering from mental disorders. Certainly his behavior in connection with nuclear weapons has been remarkably menacing. According to a Voice of America report, Putin publicly issued 27 nuclear threats between February 2022 and December 2024. He talked of “preventive disarming nuclear strikes,” promised four times to nuke Germany if it delivered Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine, ordered Russian nuclear forces to simulate a nuclear attack on Ukraine, and announced that Russia’s strategic nuclear forces “are in a state of full combat readiness for a guaranteed use.” When, in a televised interview, the CEO of a state media giant asked Putin if Russia was ready for nuclear war, he responded blithely: “Weapons exist to be used.”
Nor are other leaders of nuclear-armed nations, such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Israel’s Benjamim Netanyahu, and India’s Narendra Modi, paragons of mental health and military restraint.
Actually, the alarming connection between mental instability and nuclear weapons has long been evident. In March 1946, less than a year after the atomic bombings of Japan, an article appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature with the title: “Gentlemen: You are Mad!” The author, Lewis Mumford―a well-known American historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology―explained: “The madmen are planning the end of the world. What they call continued progress in atomic warfare means universal extermination.”
In June 1957, when a group of prominent Americans met at New York City’s Overseas Press Club to consider what should be done about the issue of nuclear weapons testing, they adopted a similar stance. “The normal drive for survival has been put out of action by present propaganda,” remarked Erich Fromm, an eminent psychoanalyst. “We must . . . try to bring the voice of sanity to the people.” Establishing a new organization, they called it the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. SANE, as the new group was usually dubbed, began with the goal of halting nuclear testing but soon broadened that to securing nuclear disarmament.
As nuclear disarmament organizations emerged around the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they frequently depicted nuclear war as madness. SANE named its newsletter Sane World, while Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament both called their newsletters Sanity.
Even government officials agreed on occasion that nuclear war was insane. In November 1957, as Nikita Khrushchev recalled, China’s Mao Zedong gave a speech that lauded nuclear war at a meeting of Communist party leaders from around the world. “We may lose more than three hundred million people,” Mao reportedly said. But “so what. War is war.” Finding Mao’s remarks “deeply disturbing,” Khrushchev came away convinced that his ally was a lunatic and eventually cut off Soviet assistance to China’s nuclear weapons program.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy also took up the nuclear insanity theme. Speaking before the UN General Assembly in September 1961, he warned that “every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” Two years later, in a major address on nuclear weapons and war, he cautioned that nuclear war could be launched “by a madman.”
Although, in the following decades, a combination of popular pressure and government response managed to curb the nuclear arms race and avert a nuclear holocaust, the world seems once again in the grip of government officials all too eager to prepare for and launch a nuclear war.
This enormous nuclear danger magnifies the importance of the first review conference for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, scheduled to occur at the United Nations from November 30 to December 4. Although signed by a majority of the world’s nations, this landmark treaty has been rejected thus far by the nuclear powers. But if they signed and implemented the treaty, it would effectively ban nuclear weapons and their immense danger to human survival.
Will humanity seize the opportunity offered by the treaty? Or are we all too mad to comprehend the fact that, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we live on the brink of nuclear annihilation?
Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
