Trump Wanted Tenfold Increase in Nuclear Arsenal, Surprising Military

This is unfortunate if true. The world has far too many nuclear weapons as it is. Roughly 15,000. Most split between the US and Russia.

These are true doomsday weapons which if detonated on a large enough scale imperil civilization itself. It’s funny, we so often hear of the threat from “climate change” or “global warming”, an issue that even now resides mostly in the abstract, meanwhile the nuclear sword of Damocles still hangs over humanity.

Expanding our nuclear arsenal would be unwise in the extreme. We have for the most part arrived at a place where pretty much everyone knows that the use of nukes is not only morally wrong, but also counter productive. We launch nukes. They launch nukes. Millions are killed. What is won? Both countries, whatever the countries, are completely destabilized and then the risk is that the nuclear war spreads. It is an apocalyptic scenario.

By expanding our now stable number of nukes it might also force the hand of Russia and China. If these countries perceive that it is at all possible that the USA might be able to overwhelm their capacity, and do it quickly, these countries could be forced by their policy makers to expand their arsenals as well. Additionally, if the game gets too out of balance there is then a sick incentive to launch war preemptively to get ahead of any nuclear arsenal expansion by rivals.

The nuclear “game” is not a game.

(From NBC)

President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the build-up. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned…

…Asked for a response to the president’s comments, a White House official speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said that the nuclear arsenal was not a primary topic of the briefing. Dana White, spokesperson for the Pentagon said “the Secretary of Defense has many closed sessions with the president and his cabinet members. Those conversations are privileged.”

At the time of the meeting, White told reporters the meeting “covered the planet,” and that the president’s advisers “went around the world,” outlining what she described as the challenges and opportunities for the U.S.

Two senior administration officials said the president’s advisers outlined the reasons an expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal is not feasible.

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