When a nuclear superpowers go rogue - everyone has a dog in the fight..

2015: Donald Trump Has No Idea What America's Nuclear Triad Is.

By Tyler Rogoway

Donald Trump, who claims to be the “best on the military” among the 2016 Presidential candidates because he is the best at everything, apparently has no idea what the nuclear triad is. The revelation came during last night’s Presidential Debate when conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump a question about the need to modernize our nuclear forces.

Trump appears stumped by question on nuclear triad.

2017: “Insanity and folly”: experts on Trump’s proposal to build tens of thousands of nukes.

“We now know why Tillerson called Trump a moron.”

Donald Trump asked his top national security officials to build tens of thousands of new nuclear weapons during a July 20 meeting, according to an NBC News report published on Wednesday morning. The president’s request, experts say, is simultaneously impossible and terrifying.

“The insanity and folly of this … cannot be overstated,” Kingston Reif, the director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, tweeted in response to the report. “Increasing [the US] arsenal would constitute [a] radical departure from U.S. policy and likely lead to [a] full fledged arms race with Russia and perhaps China,” he added.

There is no strategic reason for the US to increase its nuclear arsenal by such a large amount: The current US nuclear stockpile, around 4,000 nuclear devices, is more than enough to deter attacks from any hostile power. Building 32,000 more, the precise number Trump requested, would take many years and cost trillions of dollars.

And who would pay for them after the $8 trillion in billionaire tax cuts?

2017: What Trump Said in the Meeting That Started “Moron”-Gate

Rex Tillerson reportedly insulted his boss after Trump said he wanted to expand the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

During the campaign and into his presidency, Donald Trump has displayed an alarming lack of knowledge around the topic of nuclear weapons. In a Republican primary debate, it became clear that he had no idea what a “nuclear triad” was; he seemed confused about why the U.S. doesn’t use nuclear weapons if it has them; he has made provocative comments about South Korea and Japan becoming nuclear powers; and he’s equivocated on using a nuclear weapon in Europe.

His peculiar mind-set was on full display during a meeting with the country’s top-ranking national security officials this summer, when Trump reportedly advocated for what would be the equivalent of a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Citing three officials who were in attendance, NBC News reported Wednesday that the president said he wanted to expand the country’s arsenal in response to a slide charting its size over the past seven decades. According to the report, Trump referenced the peak of 32,000 warheads in the late 1960s and said he wanted to return to that level. (Currently, the U.S. is estimated to have 4,000 warheads in its stockpile.)

2016: Here's Why Trump Can't Be Trusted with the Nuclear Codes.

It's not only about worldwide destruction, as expert John Noonan explains.

John Noonan knows nukes. He has spent his entire life in the defense community, first as the son of a career Naval officer, then as a student in military institutions, then as a United States Air Force launch officer within the Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICMB) system. He's spent countless 24-hour shifts 100 feet below ground, surrounded by ten nuclear missiles to which he has the launch codes. After leaving the Air Force, he became a spokesperson for the House Armed Services Committee and served as a national security advisor to both Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush.

Before this election, Noonan was mostly behind the scenes, a powerful man who worked in the shadow of even more powerful politicians. That is, until Donald Trump came along and started running his mouth about using nuclear weapons with the flippancy with which most of us deploy angry-face emojis.

Noonan is a low-key guy, but such a fundamental misunderstanding by a presidential nominee of our most powerful war deterrent was too much. So he took to Twitter. In a twenty-tweet rant, Noonan rained scunnion down upon poor Donald with a series of logical points that led to one conclusion: Trump should not be given the ability to launch a nuclear weapon.

2017: Donald Trump’s very confusing thoughts on nuclear weapons, explained.

Just days before his inauguration, Donald Trump made headlines by trashing America’s European allies in an interview with two of Europe’s biggest newspapers. The hubbub over Trump’s attack on Europe obscured one of the stranger comments in the interview — that he hoped to work with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to reduce both countries’ nuclear arsenals.

“Let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia,” Trump said. “For one thing, I think nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially.” To say this is a flip-flop is an understatement. Less than a month ago, Trump tweeted that the US “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

When MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked him about the possibility of this policy setting off an arms race with Russia (which is also talking about expanding/modernizing its nuclear arsenal), Trump’s answer was simple. “Let it be an arms race.” Nuclear arms control is a hugely important issue — especially in a world where tensions between the US and two other nuclear powers, Russia and China, are heating up.

So where does Trump stand: with his comments from December, or with his comments from January? The truth is that nobody knows — leaving us in the dark on one of the very few policy issues with the potential to transform the future of human civilization. “It's difficult to discern what Trump's policy will be and whether he has given more than a few minutes’ thought to these issues,” Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, tells me.

2016: In debate, Trump’s lack of nuclear knowledge on display.

When nuclear weapons policy came up in Monday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump showed once again that he doesn’t have basic knowledge of the details and hasn’t thought through how he would handle America’s nuclear arsenal if elected. It’s only the latest example of his refusal to study up on national security.

2015: Trump’s Terrifying Nuke Answer at the Debate Should End His Campaign (But It Won’t)

Trump didn't even understand the question, but that didn't stop him from answering.

Donald Trump and I have something in common: When right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt asked the GOP frontrunner about America’s nuclear triad at Tuesday night’s debate, neither of us had heard that phrase before.

But Donald Trump is running for president, and I’m not.

There’s another difference between us: I could glean from the context of Hewitt’s question that he was asking Trump what he would do to maintain our nuclear arsenal. (The triad refers to our land-, sea- and air-based systems for delivering nukes.) Trump had absolutely no idea what Hewitt was asking, and his answer was genuinely terrifying.

Trump has said a lot of scary (and racist) things on the campaign trail, from calling undocumented immigrants rapists to saying he’d ban Muslims from the country to urging supporters at his rallies to attack protesters.

But his answer Tuesday night was especially terrifying; it revealed what it means to put an ignorant blowhard with a head full of jagged rocks in charge of enough munitions to blow up the entire world several times over.

Let’s go through his answer. If you didn’t see it in real time, know that you should experience the stomach-churning terror you feel when you climb that first hill on an especially tall roller coaster.

First, Hewitt’s question:

“Mr. Trump, Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out. It’s an executive order. It’s a commander-in-chief decision.

“What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?”

No matter how little you know about the makeup of our nuclear forces, it’s clear Hewitt is suggesting the technologies we use to deliver a nuclear attack are too old, and asking Trump what his priority would be when it comes to maintaining them. Right? You’d have to be completely ignorant, an utter buffoon with the intelligence of an earthworm the other earthworms make fun of for being dumb not to get the gist of what Hewitt is asking here.

And yet.

This was Trump’s response:

“Well, first of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important.”

On the face of it, Trump’s first comments may seem reasonable. We do need someone we can trust, who is totally responsible, who knows what he or she is doing when it comes to taking charge of our nuclear arsenal. But this wasn’t an introduction to a fuller answer explaining why he knows what he’s doing (or what his plans are). To Trump, that was the substantive answer. Listen to Trump for 30 seconds at any of his rallies and you realize that’s the entirety of his thought process. “Make America Great Again” is a perfectly fine slogan if you have a plan to make America great again, but with Trump, the slogan is the entire agenda. There is no plan.

How do we know Trump is responsible enough to handle our nuclear arsenal? He went on:

“And one of the things that I’m frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you’re going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important.”

2017: Trump Thinks About Nuclear Annihilation a Lot, But Doesn’t Know Much About It.

Earlier this month, Americans had a chance to examine what was arguably the scariest question of the 2016 campaign: Do you really want Donald Trump to have the nuclear codes?

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