There’s something almost too psychiatrically candid about nuclear scientists always being called “the father” of the bomb, or “the father” of their country’s atomic programmes. I mean, you don’t need Sigmund Freud to get to the bottom of that one, do you? Even Matthew Freud could probably explain it to you.

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The daddy of them all was “father of the atomic bomb” Robert Oppenheimer, but search the terms “father of” and “nuclear programme” and you’ll find plenty more of his professional descendants – a whole host of chaps who don’t really look like they’re the kind of dad who’ll take the bomb to the park, fix its bike, and not be a prick about putting on a wash or giving it a cuddle. They are, of course, Brilliant Men, which traditionally gives them a free pass for being a parental grotesque, both in terms of their atomic offspring and, usually, their flesh-and-blood variety.

That their laboratory creations are now in the hands of two of the world’s leading untreated daddy-issue sufferers – Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump – feels decidedly apt. Is “apt” going to see you through a nuclear winter? Is “apt” the antidote to radiation poisoning? ’Fraid not. Still, it’ll be something to muse urbanely over as the ashes fall.

The Trumps and the Kims are both nuclear families, in the Chernobyl sense of the term. It would take one of the vast machines at Los Alamos to compute the sheer number of radioactively dysfunctional angles in both domestic set-ups, though most would agree the horror is passed via the paternal line.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Tokyo TV news screen, 9 August. ‘So limited is information that much of what is known comes from the account of Kim Jong-il’s former sushi chef.’ Photograph: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images

The premise of both families is obviously entirely oxymoronic. The Trumps are the anti-elite Manhattan billionaires; the Kims are a communist dynasty. One advantage the Trumps have over the Kims is that their succession issues have thus far been less brutal. Donald Snr’s only brother didn’t want to go into the family real estate business, and died at 43. The quote Trump gave to the New York Times when his father died concerned the latter’s commercial decision not to develop property in Manhattan: “It was good for me,” ran this well-adjusted eulogy. “You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself.”

As far as the next generation goes, there was clearly some kind of unspeakable trial by combat in the nursery via which Ivanka prevailed over her brothers Donald Jr and Eric, settling her into the Oedipal first-daughter role she now enjoys, at least until Barron gets dragons. (Tiffany? Nobody worries about Tiffany.) But the question of filial supremacy with the Kims was settled far later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivanka Trump and Kushner on 4 August. ‘There was clearly some kind of unspeakable trial by combat in the nursery via which Ivanka prevailed over her brothers Donald Jr and Eric.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

So limited is information that much of what is known comes from the account of Kim Jong-il’s former sushi chef, who foretold Kim Jong-un’s succession, explaining that one brother was considered too effeminate, while the elder son Kim Jong-nam was out of his favour after his famously brief attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland. Last year, Kim Jong-nam was poisoned in Kuala Lumpur airport, which must have felt bittersweet for Kim Jong-un. Yes, he’ll have exorcised his insane jealously that his brother had got within 10 miles of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and he hadn’t. But that will have mingled with a profound sense of sadness that he never got to bound puppyishly in to his late father and deposit his poisoned brother’s corpse at his feet with the inquiry: “Have I pleased you, papa?”

Indeed, now his daddy’s gone, is Kim Jong-un doing that classic thing of looking for a proxy? Of his defence spending, he has said: “I have to let them know I have missiles because this is the only way the US will talk to me.” Perhaps touched, Trump said of Kim back in April: “He’s 27 years old. His father dies, took over a regime. So say what you want, but that is not easy, especially at that age.”

Empathy is Trump’s phantom limb, so we have to marvel at the way he is able to look at the vast misery of North Korea, and find the one thing that twitches his pity to be Kim Jong-un himself. It feels only slightly less bonkers than that great Austin Powers scene where Dr Evil attends father-son group therapy with his recently discovered son, and begins opening up about his own father issues and his occasionally filicidal megalomania.

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As the US-North Korea war of words threatens to escalate into a war of actual war then, it’s hard not to feel like the potential collateral damage in two family psychodramas. What funny, insignificant little ants the rest of us are, trying to nurture family relationships, work through family problems or, in the last resort, just survive them. That is the perverse order of things: hundreds of millions of people making immense, daily, heart-driven personal efforts to deal with their psychological shit, all of whom could be eradicated in seconds by a pair of complete dad-cases who wouldn’t dream of doing the same.

Or suffer the same consequences. One of the many deathless ironies about nuclear weapons is that those who give the order to use them would be among the vanishingly few to be protected from their effects. Still, perhaps there would be a Sartrean sort of poetic justice to that. Do just imagine the hell of the Trumps and the Kims locked in their shelters, with nothing but their own toxic interpersonal relationships for company, and all the time in the end of the world to explore them.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist