{"id":85180,"date":"2017-01-09T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2017-01-09T12:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=85180"},"modified":"2017-01-05T14:22:26","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T14:22:26","slug":"donald-trumps-new-nuclear-instability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/01\/donald-trumps-new-nuclear-instability\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump\u2019s New Nuclear Instability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>29 Dec 2016 – <\/em>President-elect Donald Trump exploded a half-century of U.S. nuclear-arms policy in a single tweet last week: \u201cThe United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.\u201d With that one vague message, Donald Trump, who hasn\u2019t even taken office yet, may have started a new arms race.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s statement set off alarms around the world, necessitating a cadre of his inner circle to flood the airwaves with now-routine attempts to explain what their boss \u201creally meant.\u201d On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow confronted former Trump campaign manager and newly appointed Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway about the shocking tweet:<\/p>\n

Maddow: \u201cHe\u2019s saying we\u2019re going to expand our nuclear capability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conway: \u201cHe\u2019s not necessarily saying that \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

Maddow: \u201c… He did literally say we need to expand our nuclear capability \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

Conway: \u201c…What he\u2019s saying is…we need to expand our nuclear capability, really our nuclear readiness, our capability to be ready for those who also have nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next morning, during a commercial break on the MSNBC program \u201cMorning Joe,\u201d Trump spoke by phone with Mika Brzezinski, as she and her co-host Joe Scarborough sat in pajamas on the Christmas-themed TV set. The call was not broadcast, but when the show came back from the break, Brzezinski quoted Trump as saying, \u201cLet it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minutes after that aired, Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, told us on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour: \u201cEvery day, Trump says something that makes us worried, but this may be the most terrifying yet. A nuclear-arms race is the last thing that the world needs. I think about climate change. I think about economic inequality. I think about all of these major threats that we\u2019re facing as a country and as a world. Why would we add on top of that a totally manufactured, unnecessary threat?\u201d<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama delivered his first address on the U.S. nuclear arsenal on April 5, 2009, in Prague: \u201cToday, the Cold War has disappeared, but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons.\u201d Then, in 2016, he proposed a 30-year, $1 trillion dollar nuclear arsenal modernization program. When asked about Obama\u2019s record, Annie Leonard told us, \u201cGreenpeace and many of our allies fought against President Obama\u2019s military spending, and we will fight against President Trump\u2019s military spending.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Obama\u2019s nuclear spending continues what Albert Einstein called, in 1946, the \u201cdrift toward unparalleled catastrophe,\u201d it still adheres to the current in-force nuclear-reduction treaty between the U.S. and Russia, called New START. This calls for the reduction in the number of warheads in both nations\u2019 stockpiles from the current amount of roughly 7,000 warheads each, to 1,550 warheads each by February 2018. Trump\u2019s declarations suggest he would scrap New START and relaunch a new nuclear-arms race between the U.S. and Russia. This, in turn, could easily trigger the desire among other existing nuclear states, like India, Pakistan and Israel, to increase their stockpiles. Trump also repeatedly stated throughout the presidential campaign that he supports the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other nations, including Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. And he has said the opposite on other occasions, which only highlights the volatility and unpredictability of this incoming commander in chief. In such an unstable world, with an increasing number of nuclear weapons, the likelihood only increases that someone, somewhere will hit the button.<\/p>\n

Alarmed at the recent developments, one group has launched a petition urging the current president to take action. \u201cWith the stroke of a pen, President Barack Obama could take our nuclear missiles off high alert, making sure that President Trump could not launch them rashly,\u201d writes Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. \u201cTrump will have the unfettered ability to launch one or one thousand nuclear warheads whenever he pleases. Four minutes after he gives the order, the missiles will fly. No one can stop him, short of a full-scale mutiny. Once launched, the missiles cannot be recalled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, Obama should take the weapons off high alert, but that\u2019s not enough. Donald Trump\u2019s finger on the nuclear trigger is a terrifying prospect. It\u2019s the anti-nuclear movement that needs to go on high alert to make sure that trigger never gets pulled.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

29 Dec 2016 – President-elect Donald Trump exploded a half-century of U.S. nuclear-arms policy in a single tweet last week: \u201cThe United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.\u201d With that one vague message, Donald Trump, who hasn\u2019t even taken office yet, may have started a new arms race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}