Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/donald-trump-nuclear-war-weapons-inevitable
"In just seven weeks, a man known for being ill-tempered, thin-skinned, narcissistic, and erratic will take control of the US nuclear arsenal. Donald Trump will have the authority and power to launch any combination of the country's 4,500 nuclear weapons. At any time and for any reason he deems fit, Trump could destroy a nation and, through miscalculation, the world. During the presidential campaign, he uttered several troubling statements about nuclear arms. At a Republican primary debate, he botched a question about the nuclear triad—America's system of sea-, air-, and land-based nuclear weapons—suggesting he did not understand the most basic information about the structure of the US nuclear command. (He babbled, "For me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.") At other points in the campaign, Trump noted he would support allowing Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons and indicated he would be open to using such weapons against ISIS and in other conflicts. What makes Trump's loose talk—and ignorance—about nuclear weapons particularly worrisome is that in the past, he has taken a fatalistic approach toward the notion of nuclear war. He has spoken as if he believed such a conflagration was almost inevitable. And now he is about to become one of the few humans on the planet who can decide the fate of the Earth."