It’s a key, not a button. That is how you launch a nuclear tipped ICBM. You turn a key.

My military career started off as a missile launch officer, one of the “finger on the button” people, except there wasn’t a button. To utterly destroy the enemy, to reduce civilization to cinders, to seal the fate of millions required the turning of a key.

When I arrived at what we called “missile school” at Vandenberg Air Force Base in the Spring of 1981, I began training to sit nuclear alert. And on day one of “Initial Qualification Training” or IQT, we walked into a classified auditorium, past mock ups of re-entry vehicles or RV (you’d call them bombs) and other missile components and took our seats. Before showing us any of the technical information, before issuing us our multi-hundred page tech manual, before even showing us the key, they showed us a presentation on what our weapon system was all about. We saw the destruction we would cause, and we were also shown a slide I remember as clear as day these 36 years later – a diagram that showed the expected effects of a Soviet RV impacting our own site. That diagram made it very clear that after we “turned keys” in a nuclear war, our own personal survival would be measured in minutes, nothing more.

The instructors wanted us to fully understand the gravity and the significance of what it meant to have direct command over nuclear weapons.  Over the course of many, many hours of classroom training, simulator rides, and classified training on the top secret “how to go to war” stuff, we slowly became missiliers. After graduation, I traveled to a spot just up the road, at F.E. Warren Air Force Base to begin my tour as a “finger on the button” guy during the Cold War. I knew how to go to war. I was the pointy end of the deterrence spear, and for decades deterrence worked.

This week senior Republican U.S. Sen Bob Corker, of Tennessee, whom the president has repeatedly attacked after Corker expressed a lack of trust in Trump, refused to state whether he thought the president could be trusted with the nuclear launch codes. Corker stated that world leaders don’t trust Mr. Trump because, as Corker put it, they are “aware that much of what he says is untrue.”

This is a remarkable exchange and was part of a larger rant involving both men. But the nuclear part, understandably, stood out to me. We’ve seen our president speak about North Korea in particular in strange (“rocketman”) terms, warning that the U.S. would “Totally destroy North Korea” should the need arise.

I admit that North Korea has always fascinated me. When I was serving temporary duty at the White House in the 1990s, on the National Security Council staff, I often read the intel on that very strange nation. I have come to think of North Korea as a demented personality cult in the shape of a country. And as such, it is far more dangerous than what we political science types like to call a “rational actor.” The leadership of that odd land sees things only in terms of how events impact them personally. Thus they see every action by the U.S. as a direct attack on them, personally.

The Pentagon estimates that North Korea has perhaps half a dozen nuclear weapons, though it clearly is trying to build more. It is not yet clear if they can miniaturize any of their weapons sufficiently to be launched toward South Korea or the U.S. While North Korea is clearly a dangerous nation and a legitimate threat to world peace, is ramping up the nuclear war talk likely to reduce such tensions? I suggest not. You may say “North Korea started it” but effective diplomacy is not based on schoolyard norms.  Our president’s seeming comfort with nuclear weapons as just another tool is both troubling and dangerous.

I was then, and remain now, very proud to have been a member of our nation’s nuclear forces. But that very experience helped shape my view that we should be very careful about reintroducing a nuclear element into a world where such an action may have significant unintended consequences. Whether opened with a button or a key, the nuclear Pandora’s Box should only be unlocked in the gravest of circumstances. I’m not at all sure we are there.