Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

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Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 01, 2017 8:02 am

Trump Plans for Nuclear
Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion,

Congressional Review States
The report from the Congressional Budget Office was
an authoritative accounting of the cost of rebuilding a
nuclear arsenal that relies on Cold War-era technology.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGEROCT. 31, 2017

The price tag of President Trump’s vision of remaking the American nuclear arsenal soared on Tuesday as a new government estimate put the cost of a 30-year makeover at $1.2 trillion, more than 20 percent higher than earlier figures.

The rebuilding proposal includes the nation’s nuclear weapons, bombers, missiles and submarines.

The report from the Congressional Budget Office was the most authoritative accounting yet of the full cost of rebuilding an aging, potentially vulnerable nuclear arsenal that often relies on Cold War-era technology. It was published just weeks before the Pentagon is supposed to issue its first broad nuclear strategy of the Trump administration, an assessment called the Nuclear Posture Review.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who had been a skeptic about the need to preserve the nuclear force’s 400 land-based missiles, in silos across the American West, said in September that he had changed his view and now believed it was necessary to preserve them.

Mr. Trump has publicly declared that he wants the American nuclear arsenal to be “top of the pack,” and has been widely reported as asking his aides why the United States needs to limit the number of deployed warheads to 1,550, as set by the 2010 New START treaty with Russia. But he has said nothing about breaking out of the treaty, and the estimate issued Tuesday by the budget office is based largely on plans that were left over from President Barack Obama’s time in office.

Those plans may grow more ambitious, senior administration officials say, as the White House seeks new ways to counter North Korea, push back against Iran and deal with significant nuclear modernization in both Russia and China. The authors of the Nuclear Posture Review were told they could consider the building of new types of nuclear weapons, even some now prohibited by treaty.

Any changes could drive up the estimated cost of rebuilding the nation’s arsenal, and the figures released Tuesday did not account for inflation, which independent experts say would drive the total figure to more than $1.6 trillion.

The overall direction of the buildup may also end the discussion, driven by Mr. Obama during much of his term, about how to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in American offensive and defensive planning. In the end Mr. Obama walked back from his vision, deciding against eliminating one leg of the “triad” — made up of weapons carried aboard ground-based missiles, submarines and bombers — and he rejected advice from some of his top nuclear strategists about how to bring the total number of deployed American weapons below 1,000, even if President Vladimir V. Putin was not willing to make similar cuts.

Critics of the American arsenal, who grew increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama, have urged Mr. Trump to pare back, for reasons of budget if not strategy.

Two former senior military officials, William J. Perry, who served as secretary of defense, and Gen. James E. Cartwright, who served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the congressional report as “a wake up call” in a letter Tuesday to Mr. Trump. The report demonstrated that current plans to rebuild the nuclear arsenal “are unsustainable and must be rethought,” they wrote.

The report, about 70 pages long, details nine cost-cutting options for Congress that run from relatively minor to more extensive.

One option, for example, examined the savings if the administration decided to forego a new generation of nuclear cruise missiles — low-flying weapons with stubby wings that, when dropped from a bomber, hug the ground to avoid enemy radars and air defenses.

The weapon was endorsed by Mr. Obama, though it has been criticized by other Democratic nuclear experts, like William Perry, as destabilizing. In any event, its elimination would save only about $30 billion — about 2.5 percent of the total nuclear expenditures.

Another option called for deploying fewer submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles than currently planned. Over three decades, that would save $85 billion. Scrapping the aging land-based missiles altogether would result in the largest savings, $175 billion.

“It explodes the myth that the plan’s proponents have been trying to foist on us — that it’s all of the above or nothing,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a private group in Washington. “The reality is that there’re a number practical options to save tens of billions of dollars while still maintaining a robust nuclear force.”

The $1.2 trillion figure over three decades compares to annual expenditures for Medicare of about $650 billion and for Medicaid of about $550 billion.

“The stark reality underlined by C.B.O. is that unless the U.S. government finds a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the nuclear weapons spending plan inherited by the Trump administration will pose a crushing affordability problem,” said Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.

While Mr. Trump likes to take credit for the nuclear weapons push, the costly makeover actually began with Mr. Obama, despite his repeated calls for “a world without nuclear weapons.” Mr. Obama argued that by making nuclear weapons safer and more reliable, their numbers could eventually be reduced, setting the world on a path to their elimination. Some of Mr. Obama’s aides, thinking that Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election, expected deep cuts in the $1 trillion plan.

Mr. Trump inherited the costly makeover, and his first budget proposed to move fully ahead with the Obama administration approach — and then some. In an August speech, he boasted that his administration was spending “vast amounts” on overhauling the nuclear arsenal.

Administration critics and arms control advocates say the Congressional Budget Office report reveals how extraordinarily difficult it will become in future years to maintain the nuclear weapons plan and the administration’s promises as the costs of the rebuilding program begin to soar.

“Many elements of Trump’s nuclear spending spree are excessive and dangerous,” said Tom Z. Collina, policy director at Ploughshares Fund. “We would be safer and richer without them.”

Mr. Perry, the former defense secretary, argued last year in a New York Times Op-Ed article that eliminating the ground-based missiles would improve global security. “These missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons in the world,” he wrote. “They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war” because their vulnerability to pre-emptive strikes would, in a time of crisis, give the president an incentive to launch them.

Critics see the nation’s launch-on-warning policy as greatly increasing the risk of accidental war. In the past, they note, false alerts have repeatedly brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear disaster.

“We should consider all aspects of our nuclear posture, and our conventional forces’ needs,” Mr. Perry and General Cartwright wrote to Mr. Trump, “before rushing headlong into these expensive and contentious development programs.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/us/p ... udget.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXl8vRmLeJk
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 18, 2017 6:56 pm

Top general says he would resist "illegal" nuke order from Trump

5:37 PM EST POLITICS
BY KATHRYN WATSON / CBS NEWS

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, speaks at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia on Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017.
The Halifax International Security Forum

The top U.S. nuclear commander said Saturday he would push back against President Trump if he ordered a nuclear launch the general believed to be "illegal," saying he would look to find another solution.

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), told an audience at the Halifax International Security Forum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Saturday that he has given a lot of thought to what he would say if a president ordered a strike he considered unlawful.

"I think some people think we're stupid," Hyten said in response to a question about such a scenario. "We're not stupid people. We think about these things a lot. When you have this responsibility, how do you not think about it?"

Hyten was responding to a question about testimony by former STRATCOM commander retired Gen. Robert Kehler before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this week. Kehler said that nuclear operators would refuse to implement an unlawful order. Hyten agreed, and argued that the process in place to launch a nuclear strike would prevent such a situation from arising in the first place. Hyten explained the process that would follow such a command. As head of STRATCOM, Hyten is responsible for overseeing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

"I provide advice to the president, he will tell me what to do," Hyten added. "And if it's illegal, guess what's going to happen? I'm going to say, 'Mr. President, that's illegal.' And guess what he's going to do? He's going to say, 'What would be legal?' And we'll come up with options, with a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that's the way it works. It's not that complicated."

Hyten said he has been trained every year for decades in the law of armed conflict, which takes into account specific factors to determine legality -- necessity, distinction, proportionality, unnecessary suffering and more. Running through scenarios of how to react in the event of an illegal order is standard practice, he said.

"If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life," Hyten said.

Hyten's comments come against the backdrop of continued tension with North Korea. In the past, the president has pledged to unleash "fire and fury" and to "totally destroy" North Korea if necessary. Hyten's comments also come as Congress is re-examining the authorization of the use of military force and power to launch a nuclear strike.

Hyten said the U.S. military is always ready to respond to the threat of North Korea, even at that very moment.




President Trump: China will help with North Korea
"And we are ready every minute of every day to respond to any event that comes out of North Korea. That's the element of deterrence that has to be clear, and it is clear," Hyten said.

But Hyten also said handling North Korea and its unpredictable leader Kim Jong Un has to be an international effort. Mr. Trump has continued to put pressure on China to help manage its tempestuous neighbor.

"President Trump by himself can't change the behavior of Kim Jong Un," Hyten said. "But President Trump can create the conditions that the international community can reach out in different ways where we can work with the Republic of Korea, where we can work with our neighbors in the region."

CBS News' Stefan Becket contributed to this report.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/u-s-st ... rom-trump/
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:41 am

Is the Trump Administration Planning a First Strike on North Korea?
Saturday, November 18, 2017
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis

Protesters gather to ask President Donald Trump to stop his drive to war against North Korea on August 14, 2017 in Miami, Florida. The protesters feel that President Trump's rhetoric has created the threat of a devastating nuclear war for the first time since the Cuban missle crisis. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Protesters gather to ask President Donald Trump to stop his drive to war against North Korea on August 14, 2017, in Miami, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

With everything going on in the White House, the media must maintain relentless pressure on the Trump administration. Can you support Truthout in this endeavor? Click here to donate.
Ever since the Trump administration began a few months ago to threaten a first strike against North Korea over its continued missile tests, the question of whether it is seriously ready to wage war has loomed over other crises in US foreign policy.

The news media have avoided any serious effort to answer that question, for an obvious reason: The administration has an overriding interest in convincing the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un that Trump would indeed order a first strike if the regime continues to test nuclear weapons and an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Therefore, most media have shied away from digging too deeply into the distinction between an actual policy of a first strike and a political ruse intended to put pressure on Pyongyang.

The use of military threat for "diplomatic coercion" is such a basic tool of US policy in dealing with weaker adversaries that it is almost taken for granted in Washington. Even diplomats who have been deeply involved in negotiating with North Korea are supportive of using that threat as part of a broader diplomatic strategy. Robert Gallucci, the State Department official who negotiated the "Agreed Framework" with North Korean officials in 1994, noted in an email to Truthout, "We do want the North to understand that their actions could lead the US to a preventive strike -- wise or not."

The linkage between the Trump administration's threat of a "military option" and US diplomatic pressure on North Korea was clear from its first suggestion that it might carry out a first strike. That suggestion came on April 13, immediately upon the completion of the administration's policy review on North Korea, when NBC News reported that "multiple senior intelligence officials" had said that the administration was "prepared to launch a preemptive strike" if officials "became convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapon test." A story in the Washington Post published the following day offered a slightly different version: The administration was "prepared to respond to another North Korean nuclear test" and had "a range of options at its disposal" but would not "telegraph its response in advance."

However, an unnamed military official told the Associated Press that same day that the policy that had been approved by the National Security Council did not envision the use of force in response to a nuclear or missile test, thus revealing that the leaks involving the threat of a preemptive or retaliatory attack over North Korean testing were part of a clumsy effort at "coercive diplomacy."

Further buttressing that interpretation are revelations that top Pentagon officials are dubious that a first strike against North Korean missile and nuclear sites could be completely successful. In response to a letter from Congressman Ted Lieu (D-California), Rear Admiral Michael J. Dumont, the vice director of Joint Staff, which works under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a remarkable revelation: The only way to "locate and destroy -- with complete certainty -- all components of North Korea's nuclear programs" is "through ground invasion."

An unidentified senior Pentagon official went even further, telling Harry J. Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, "We don't know where all the nuclear weapons and missiles are. Period." Other Pentagon officials confirmed the same point to Kazianis. Those admissions, which undercut the effort to convince North Korea that a US first strike is not only feasible but is possible if it continues on its present course, make it clear that the top civilian and military leaders at the Pentagon do not support a first strike policy.

The main reason for the Pentagon's open reluctance to embrace such an option, however, is that military leaders are well aware that North Korea could respond to a US first strike on its missile and nuclear targets with a devastating artillery and rocket attack on the, South Korean capital, Seoul. According to a Stratfor report, North Korean artillery batteries and 300 mm rocket launchers, burrowed into the side of granite mountains just north of the demilitarized zone, could deliver "roughly the same amount of ordinance dropped by 11 B-52 bombers." And although the US and South Korean air forces would begin immediately to counterattack those batteries and launchers, it would be too late to prevent extremely high civilian casualties.

Despite these clear indications of military opposition to maintaining a US first-strike threat, some Trump administration officials have sought to keep that threat alive. Van Jackson, who was country director for Korea in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2009 to 2014 and now teaches at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand told Truthout that key figures in the Trump administration believe that the United States must do whatever is necessary to stop the North Korean development of a missile capable of reaching the United States with a nuclear weapon. "My sources are telling me that everybody in the administration except Tillerson and Mattis believes that, if North Korea has the capability, they will use it," Jackson said in an interview.

The consensus among North Korea specialists in the Obama administration had been that North Korea was pursuing nuclear weapons as a deterrent to ensure regime survival, according to Jackson. But now, he says, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Matt Pottinger, the national security council director for Asia, have adopted a radically different view. "They say North Korea is not deterrable, so its development of an ICBM must not be allowed," Jackson said.

Jackson agrees that Secretary of Defense James Mattis opposes the option of a US first strike against North Korea, but he fears that McMaster and Pottinger have won Trump over to their argument. That would explain why the Trump administration has adopted the adamant position that it will not negotiate with North Korea except on the premise of complete denuclearization. Most of the national security elite regard such a demand as impossible to attain, especially since the Pentagon doesn't even know where the weapons are.

Even as he was advancing the idea that North Korea wouldn't be deterred once it could reach the United States, however, McMaster was reportedly arguing that the regime can now be deterred from responding to a very precise US attack on its missile sites. Former State Department official Mark Fitzpatrick, now head of the Washington office of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies observed on November 8, that the belligerent line taken by McMaster and the White House was based on "the assumption that North Korea would not respond forcefully" to a US attack on its missile test and launching facilities, "because it would know it would lose everything in the war that would follow." Fitzpatrick noted, however, that a defector from North Korea's embassy in London, Thae Yong-ho, had warned that the North Korean response to any attack, "no matter how small," would be "fierce."

The Trump administration could seek to increase the pressure on North Korea still further by making one or more moves preparing for -- but short of -- war. For example, it could bring more US ground troops into South Korea or Japan. However, the North Korean regime might well interpret that move as a signal that the US intends to attack and invade the North, since that would seem to be precisely the purpose of moving reinforcements into the theater. In fact, according to Jackson, the North Koreans told US diplomats during the 1994 crisis that they had studied carefully the US large-scale troop movements in preparation for the first Gulf War in 1990-91, and warned that they would respond to a move like that one in their region by launching their own preemptive attack.

It isn't yet possible to know definitely whether the Trump administration intends to strike first against North Korea. The official threats of such a strike can be discounted as obviously related to an elaborate -- if somewhat crude -- psychological warfare campaign. But more twists and turns in US policy can be expected in the coming months, and the desperate desire to coerce Pyongyang may also have given rise to wishful thinking on the part of McMaster and, more dangerously, Trump himself, about deterring that regime's response to a US first strike. That in turn could still pose a grave threat of yet another unnecessary and terrible war.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4264 ... orth-korea


Eric Garland Retweeted CBS News
For those pushing the hysteria that Trump will nuke his way out of legal trouble, America's top nuclear commander has news: No.


SALUTE AND SERVE
Nervous Pentagon Wonders if It Can Slow Down Commander in Chief Trump
Every troop swears to follow the orders of the president. But what if those orders constitute a war crime? Some at the Pentagon say they could stonewall or refuse—but will they?

NANCY A. YOUSSEF
11.10.16 1:05 AM ET
Even as in some parts of the Pentagon the shock of Tuesday’s election was setting in, there already was talk about how the military’s legal and constitutional duties could serve as a check and balance against some of President-elect Donald Trump’s potentially troubling national-security policies.

To become a member of the U.S. military, every troop must take an oath to follow the orders of the president, regardless of that service member’s political affiliation or personal opinions.


“We have to salute and serve for this country,” one officer told The Daily Beast. “We can’t do that if we are seen as political.”

On Wednesday at the Pentagon, commanders privately said, if there was ever a reason to be grateful for its apolitical military, it was now. An apolitical military does not swear an oath to a person but an office and a Constitution.

That separation allows commanders advising President Trump to refuse to follow orders that call for committing war crimes, like his proposal to kill the families of suspected terrorists. In March, Trump said he would force the military to commit war crimes.

If President Trump proposes an idea the military uniformly considers legal but dangerous, commanders have a knack for stonewalling to buy time in hopes for crisis to pass, much as the military did in 1970 when President Nixon wanted to launch strikes in the Middle East.


There is just one question: Will they? Will the U.S. military be so bold? Will the generals stand up to their commander in chief? In recent history, like the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, the military has been less than forceful about standing up to civilians.


Instead, Tuesday’s election was something to be discussed only with trusted colleagues. After all, if the military is supposed to be apolitical, election-related talk becomes touchy on the most innocuous of days. And this time, there was a patina of suspicion among troops and civilian employees of the Pentagon, as though colleagues were suddenly unsure of the political leanings of those around them.

There was no way to distract oneself with draft plans based on Trump’s military proposals, officials said, since he proposed both sides of most issues throughout the campaign. He said he wanted to add as many as 70,000 troops to the Army but said the U.S. should stop nation-building. He slammed NATO but also said he would work with it. His posture toward Russia seems to counter his promise to put America’s interests first and project a strong, forceful American policy.

Just two days ago, he called those U.S. forces leading the offensive to rid the Iraqi city of Mosul of the self-proclaimed Islamic State a “group of losers.”

“Let’s be honest. We have no idea what he is going to do. Maybe he was just saying that stuff for the election,” one Army colonel suggested.


To avoid political pitfalls, troops answered election-related questions by repeating the relevant part of their oath—with one newly added caveat.

“I will obey the orders of the president of the United States. I will obey the orders of the president of the United States. I will obey the orders of the president of the United States—unless ordered to do something illegal.”

To be sure, much as Washington does not reflect the rest of the country, the Pentagon does not mirror the rest of military. There were Trump supporters at the building, quiety jubilant. They said they trusted Trump more and that they wanted marked change in Washington.

Polls of the U.S. military leading up to Tuesday’s election offered a variety of results. A September NBC News/SurveyMonkey Weekly Election poll found Trump led among active-duty service members and veterans by 19 percentage points, 55 to 36 percent. The same survey found that active-duty service members and veterans were more confident in Trump as commander in chief than the general public. They were less confident about Hillary Clinton as the head of the armed forces than non-military surveyed.

There also appeared to be a divide between officers and enlisted troops. A September Military Times poll found that 28 percent of officers favored Clinton, compared to 14 percent of enlisted troops. The numbers were in reverse for Trump. According to the survey, 26 percent of officers supported the eventual 2016 presidential winner compared to 40 percent of enlisted troops.

The Military Times survey of 2,200 troops concluded that Trump beat Clinton easily overall among troops, 38 to 16 percent. Trump’s biggest challenger among the military, the poll found, was not Clinton but Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who earned 37 percent support overall of those surveyed.

The tone of the campaign language hung over the building in the hours after the only survey that ultimately mattered, the one conducted on Election Day. Will the man who referred to grabbing women “by the pussy” support the military’s effort to integrate women in combat units, now less than a year old?

Will a man who has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin protect U.S. allies that also are Putin’s foes, like Ukraine?

For months, the Pentagon has been prepping for the election. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has sent no fewer than six messages urging commanders to remain apolitical. But the messages could not predict the nation’s reaction.

“Importantly, as an institution, the American people cannot be looking at us as a special-interest group or a partisan organization,” Dunford told reporters in August.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nervous-p ... hief-trump
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 20, 2017 12:14 pm

US could broaden its use of nuclear weapons, Trump administration signals

Wider role for weapons to counter ‘non-nuclear strategic attacks’ unveiled as part of Trump’s new security strategy, which also failed to address climate change

Julian BorgerLast modified on Tue 19 Dec ‘17 10.21 EST

Donald Trump unveiled his ‘America First’ national security strategy on 18 December.

The Trump administration signaled that it could broaden the use of nuclear weapons as part of a new security strategy, unveiled by the president on Monday.

The wider role for nuclear weapons against “non-nuclear strategic attacks” was one of several ways in which Trump’s approach differed from his predecessor. The threat of climate change went unmentioned. The word “climate” was used only four times in the National Security Strategy (NSS), and three of those mentions referred to the business environment. Americans were instead urged to “embrace energy dominance”.

Announcing the NSS, Donald Trump depicted his election victory and his presidency as an unprecedented turning point in US history.

“America is coming back, and America is coming back strong,” the president said. “We are rebuilding our nation, our confidence, and our standing in the world … [W]e will stand up for ourselves, and we will stand up for our country like we have never stood up before.”

On the same day of the NSS launch, however, the US found itself isolated at the UN security council, where the other 14 members, including Washington’s closest allies, voted to rescind Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The US envoy, Nikki Haley, called the vote an “insult” that “won’t be forgotten”.

Piling on the insults, the French foreign minister, Yves Le Drian, said on a visit to Washington that US isolation on several global issues “forces President Trump to have a position of retreat on most topics rather than making proposals”.

Under the slogan of “peace through strength”, Trump emphasised the military buildup he had ordered, involving what the president described (wrongly) as a record in defence spending, $700bn for 2018.

The question is – are we creating more pathways to potential nuclear war?
Hans Kristensen, Federation of American Scientists
“We recognise that weakness is the surest path to conflict, and unrivaled power is the most certain means of defence,” he said.

The NSS policy document criticises the downgrading of the role of nuclear weapons in the US security strategy by previous administrations since the cold war, and suggested it had not prevented nuclear-armed adversaries expanding their arsenals and delivery systems.

“While nuclear deterrence strategies cannot prevent all conflict, they are essential to prevent nuclear attack, non-nuclear strategic attacks, and large-scale conventional aggression,” the NSS said.

“Non-nuclear strategic attacks” represents a new category of threat that US nuclear weapons could be used to counter, and points towards likely changes in the Nuclear Posture Review expected in the next few weeks.
Image
Activists with the international campaign to abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) protest in Berlin.
Activists with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) protest in Berlin. Photograph: Omer Messinger/Getty Images
In September, the deputy assistant secretary of defence, Rob Soofer, included “cyber-attacks against US infrastructure” in the category of non-nuclear strategic threats.

“This is a very strong hint. It matches a lot of rumours we have heard over the past few weeks,” said Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s a taste of what will come in the Nuclear Posture Review. What is interesting is the broadening of the nuclear weapons mission against non-nuclear attacks. The question is – are we creating more pathways to potential nuclear war?”

Much of Trump’s speech launching the NSS was devoted to denigrating his predecessors, who he portrayed as having let their country down.

“They lost sight of America’s destiny. And they lost their belief in American greatness. As a result, our citizens lost something as well. The people lost confidence in their government and, eventually, even lost confidence in their future,” the president said.

With its language about national resurgence and competition with other states, George Lopez, emeritus peace studies professor at Notre Dame University, said the NSS “sounds a lot like the 1980s revisited”.

“In casting a world of competition in which everything is focused on nation states, it doesn’t account for biological pandemics or climate change,” Lopez said.

He noted the dissonance between the White House and the Pentagon on climate change. The NSS directly contradicts the National Defence Authorisation Act the president signed this week, which called climate change a “direct threat to the national security of the United States”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... y-strategy
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby 82_28 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 1:24 pm

Again. Watch the next two months leading up to the Olympics. Nothing ever good comes out of the Olympics.

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There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 20, 2017 1:58 pm

Nothing like a criminal demented cornered rat with a nuke
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 03, 2018 11:58 am

from Mother Jones

Why You Really Should Be Terrified About Trump and Nuclear Weapons

The revelation that he wanted nearly ten times the number of nukes is just the start.

David Corn

Oct. 11, 2017 1:57 PM


On Wednesday morning, NBC News provided sane people with more reason to be scared: at a private July 20 meeting with his top national security officials, President Donald Trump said he wanted a nearly tenfold increase in the US nuclear arsenal. He made this remark after being shown a chart that illustrated a steady decrease in the number of US nuclear weapons over the past 50 years. Trump responded by telling his most senior advisers, which included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he wanted the bigger number shown at the start of the downward slope, not the smaller amount at the end. Officials had to explain to Trump that the current level was lower due to years of successful arms treaties and that the nation’s overall military posture was now much stronger than in the days of a larger and bloated nuclear arsenal. It was at the end of this meeting—where other national security matters were discussed—that Tillerson apparently was overheard referring to Trump as a “moron.”

It is indeed worrisome that Trump seemed to adopt a simplistic and dangerous more-is-better approach to nuclear weapons. But what’s even more unsettling, as I have previously written, is that Trump has a history of making comments about nuclear weapons that both display his profound ignorance about this all-important subject and suggest he believes a nuclear conflict is inevitable and perhaps destined for the near future.

Trump first demonstrated he knew little about nuclear weapons in the 1980s, when he repeatedly boasted to reporters that he would make a good nuclear arms negotiator and that the job would be easy. In a 1984 interview with the Washington Post, Trump, then a 38-year-old celebrity developer, said he hoped one day to become the United States’ chief negotiator with the Soviet Union for nuclear weapons. Trump declared he could negotiate a great nuclear arms deal with Moscow. Comparing crafting an arms accord with cooking up a real estate deal, Trump insisted he had innate talent for this mission. He claimed he would know exactly what to demand of the Russians—though he conceded his lack of experience in the technical field of nuclear weaponry. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles…I think I know most of it anyway,” he said. “You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation.”

A few months earlier, Trump had expressed the same sentiment to a New York Times reporter. The writer noted, “Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements—he who can talk people into selling $100 million properties to him for $13 million. Negotiations is an art, he says and I have a gift for it.” In 1986, Trump told Bernard Lown, a cardiologist who invented the defibrillator and who received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for joining with a prominent Soviet physician to promote nuclear arms reduction, that he could concoct a nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviet Union and end the Cold War in an hour.

Trump’s assertions that a nuclear deal could be quickly forged indicated he knew little of the subject. And during the 2016 presidential campaign, he uttered several troubling statements about nuclear arms that revealed he hadn’t learned much in the intervening decades At a Republican debate, he botched a question about the nuclear triad—America’s system of sea-, air-, and land-based nuclear weapons—a clear sign he did not understand the fundamentals of 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 times during the campaign, Trump said he would support allowing Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons and signalled he would be open to using such weapons against ISIS and in other conflicts.)

Over the years, Trump’s reckless and fact-free talk about nuclear weapons has been coupled with remarks showing he has a fatalistic approach and possibly believes a nuclear conflagration is unavoidable. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, Trump said, “I think of the future, but I refuse to paint it. Anything can happen. But I often think of nuclear war.” He explained:

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit…It’s like thinking the Titanic can’t sink. Too many countries have nuclear weapons; nobody knows where they’re all pointed, what button it takes to launch them.

Five years later, Trump was asked where he would be in five years. “Who knows?” he replied. “Maybe the bombs drop from heaven, who knows? This is a sick world, we’re dealing here with lots of sickos. And you have the nuclear and you have the this and you have the that.” Trump continued expressing the notion that nuclear annihilation could be on the horizon: “Oh absolutely. I mean, I think it’s sick human nature. If Hitler had the bomb, you don’t think he would have used it? He would have put it in the middle of Fifth Avenue. He would have used Trump Tower, 57th and Fifth. Boom. I mean, you have people that are sick and they are now having nuclear arsenals…I like to project for the future but really live very much for the present. And I like to learn from the past, but it’s very very fragile, life is so fragile.

In another Playboy interview—this one in 2004—Trump once more conveyed his nuclear despondency. He was asked, “Do you think Trump Tower and your other buildings will bear your name a hundred years from now?” Trump responded, “I don’t think any building will be here—and unless we have some very smart people ruling it, the world will not be the same place in a hundred years. The weapons are too powerful, too strong.”

So for decades, it seems, Trump has been haunted by the feeling that nuclear war may be inescapable. Now he is in a position to do something about the matter. But instead of taking steps to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, he has repeatedly discussed increasing the number of nukes within the US arsenal and abroad. (At the July 20 meeting, Trump essentially said he wanted the US nuclear stockpile to expand from about 4,000 to about 32,000 weapons.) And the threats Trump has hurled at North Korea— it will face “fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before”—imply that he has considered the use of nuclear weapons against Kim Jong Un. (By the way, should Trump order a nuclear strike, it would be damn hard for anyone around him to stop it.)

There is much that is alarming about Trump’s nuclear posture. His attitude toward nuclear policy is cavalier. (Hey, this stuff is easy!) He lacks basic knowledge of nuclear matters. And he is reckless in issuing nuclear-ish threats. (During the 2016 campaign, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported that Trump had thrice asked a national security adviser why a president couldn’t use nuclear weapons.) But what renders this terrifying trifecta even more frightening is the nuclear fatalism Trump has voiced throughout the years. If he thinks nuclear war is inevitable, might he feel less restrained when it comes to unleashing weaponry that can destroy human civilization? Tillerson’s use of the m-word has received much media attention, justifiably. But the bigger story by far is that Tillerson’s “moron” is in command of the nuclear arsenal and years’ worth of evidence indicates that Trump wants it to grow, that he’s interested in putting it to use, and that he believes a nuclear catastrophe is bound to happen. That’s a prophecy his own actions and ignorance could well end up bringing about.


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... r-weapons/



Does Congress Think Trump Can Be Trusted With Nuclear Weapons?


At a hearing, senators shared their fears.

DAVID CORN

NOV. 14, 2017 1:27 PM


This past summer, I explored probably one of the most important questions facing the nation and the world: could President Donald Trump be stopped from recklessly using nuclear weapons? Interviews with several experts in nuclear command and control yielded an answer that was not encouraging: probably not, unless his order to launch was met with a full-scale mutiny from the military. On Tuesday, the Senate foreign relations committee examined this topic, and it hardly presented a clearer or more reassuring picture.

As senators questioned three experts—retired Gen. C. Robert Kehler, a former commander of the US Strategic Command, Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University, and Brian McKeon, a former acting undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon—the point was repeatedly made that Trump has the ultimate and sole authority to send nuclear weapons flying. This is especially true in the case of the United States facing an imminent threat, such as a foreign adversary launching (or preparing to launch) a nuclear strike against the United States. In these circumstances, the president would have minutes to decide whether to order a nuclear assault. There would be little time for the president to consult with anyone but a few advisers before reaching a decision. The nation and the rest of the world would be at his mercy.

The other scenario considered by the committee and its witnesses was less cut and dry: what could happen if the president ordered a nuclear attack when there was no imminent threat? Say, Trump wanted to strike at Rocket Man in North Korea because he would not give up his nuclear weapons program. Was there any ability to counter a presidential decision to use nuclear weapons in such an instance?

Kehler contended that a rational process was in place and that a presidential order to launch nuclear weapons would be subject to the fundamental constraints applicable to all military orders. “The military does not blindly follow orders,” Kehler said, explaining that such orders “must be legal” in terms of military necessity and proportionality. He seemed to be suggesting that the US Strategic Command, which is in charge of the US nuclear arsenal, could reject an order it deemed illegal. “There are always legal constraints” on all military operations, he insisted, and he pointed out that the military “is not obligated to follow illegal orders.” He added, “If you believe [a military order] did not meet the legal test of proportionality…you retain the decision to disobey the commander in chief.”

That seemed heartening. But there was one one huge wrinkle. Asked what would happen if a military commander concluded a presidential order to use nuclear weapons was not legal, Kehler said that “would be a very difficult process and would be a very difficult conversation.” He did envision the possibility of a commander saying, “I have a question. I am not willing to proceed.” What would happen next? “I don’t know,” Kehler replied.

McKeon, though, had an answer. He told the committee that the president would certainly have recourse in the face of a defiant commander: He could order the defense secretary to instruct the commander to implement the order. If that didn’t work, the president could immediately fire the defense secretary and commander and get new ones. In other words, a commander refusing a nuclear order would likely only delay a president bent on deploying nuclear weapons. It would take essentially a military rebellion—commander after commander saying no to the president—to stop this nuclear war.

At one point, McKeon tried to present a calming sentiment: “It’s hard to imagine—and would be very unusual—for the president to make the decision to use nuclear weapons without consultations.” He insisted that if the president’s military and national security advisers had concerns about an order to use nuclear weapons, “we would be able to resolve those issues.” Feaver noted there would be a “large group” of military and legal advisers weighing in.

But Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) offered a sharp retort: “We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable and is so volatile…that he might order a nuclear weapon strike that is so wildly out of step with US national security interests.” Could calmer heads prevail? Not necessarily.

Watching the hearing, Joe Cirincione, a nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund, tweeted, “Those defending the status quo, like Kehler, pretend that a ‘conference’ or ‘consultation’ must take place. This is not true. POTUS can make decision all by himself.” He added, “Kehler is trying desperately to avoid the obvious: If a crazy President orders a legal nuclear strike from one of the already vetted war plans, there is no one that can stop him.” (Cirincione also criticized the selection of the panel: “If you’re having a hearing on changing the president’s ability to launch nuclear war, you might want to have at least one witness who thinks we need to change. Just saying.”)

At the hearing, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) promoted legislation he has introduced that would prohibit a president from launching a nuclear first strike—that means an attack that is not in response to an imminent threat—without a declaration of war by Congress. Markey has argued that no president should be allowed to use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack. (Former Defense Secretary William Perry has endorsed Markey’s bill.) “I don’t think we should be trusting the generals to be a check on the president,” Markey said.

At the start of the hearing, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) noted that he usually doesn’t get questions about foreign policy when he holds town hall meetings with constituents, but lately he has repeatedly been asked if the president can “really order a nuclear attack without any controls.” And Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the committee chairman, said that this hearing was the first time in 41 years that any foreign affairs committee of Congress has met to discuss this topic.

That’s what Trump has done: he has made nuclear fears quite real again. The witnesses tried to depict the current policy as generally safe and reasonable. But they could not avoid a basic fact: the system ultimately depends on the judgement of one person. Trump is an erratic and impulsive man who has repeatedly demonstrated minimal devotion to facts. He also has expressed troubling views about nuclear weapons, sometimes adopting a fatalistic stance toward nuclear war. This hearing did little to allay reasonable worries about Trump and nukes. The only consolation prize is that it demonstrated that if you’re losing sleep about Trump possessing the power to destroy the civilized world, you are not alone.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... r-weapons/




Rob Reiner

14h14 hours ago
Trump just said he has a bigger penis than Kim Jong Un. The United States’ security is relegated to someone with a severe inferiority complex who threatens a nuclear Holocaust to compensate for his lack of self worth. God help us.



this man belongs in a padded room....and someone really needs to see that happen soon for the sake of the planet


he is decomposing before our very eyes


“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

---trump


After the meeting, the leaders came to the consensus that Donald Trump “is insane.”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOSddYeyxgc
https://trofire.com/2018/01/02/guys-ins ... ald-trump/



and he's punching at Pakistan ....all before dinner tonight
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 14, 2018 9:43 am

FALSE ALARM REAL FEAR


IN 15 MINUTES REPORTERS FOOUND OUT THAT IT WAS AN ERROR



trump has scared the shit out of people about nuclear war with North Korea and all he can do when this happens is just keep golfing

trump should have "tweeted" something immediately about this not let CNN do his work for him

For 38 minutes American citizens in Hawaii braced for a ballistic missile strike ... and trump continued his round of golf in Florida on his 120th taxpayer funded vacation day in less than a year

he could use twitter to IMMEDIATELY tell Hawaii there was no incoming nuke, he just kept golfing and then his first tweet was about Wolff's book

Chomsky is correct

but the fact of the matter is that today’s Republican Party qualify as candidates for the most dangerous organization in human history. Literally.



Hawaii Missile Alert Was Sent in Error, Triggering Panic and Exposing Flaws

Incident exposes significant flaws in emergency-alert system that had been expanded following North Korea threats

Natalie Andrews Updated Jan. 13, 2018 9:47 p.m. ET

A Hawaii Civil Defense Warning Device in Honolulu. An emergency alert, later called a false alarm, frightened residents Saturday when it warned of a missile attack. Photo: Caleb Jones/Associated Press

On Saturday morning, just after 8 a.m. local time, a Hawaii state employee hit the wrong button on a computer during a shift change and accidentally sent an alert to many of the state’s cellphones that a ballistic missile was about to strike. For nearly 40 minutes, scores of Hawaii residents thought their world was about to end.

“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” the alert said, in all-caps, to the island chain of about 1.4 million people. “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Officials canceled the alert six minutes later to stop it from being sent to people who hadn’t already received it. But the news continued to proliferate as frightened residents called friends and family members. Thirty-eight minutes passed before state officials sent a new message that said the first alert had been a false alarm.

By then, the initial alert had triggered widespread panic throughout the islands. Children were roused and hidden under anything their parents could find. A family cowered together behind a couch, praying.

The incident also exposed significant flaws in the state’s emergency-alert system, which has been beefed-up in recent months following threats and missile tests by North Korea.

At a press conference Saturday afternoon, Vern T. Miyagi, administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, said the alert was mistakenly triggered when the wrong computer button was clicked during a morning shift change test of the emergency-alert system.

The alert was canceled, said state officials, who added that it could explain, at least in part, why some residents received the alerts while others didn’t.
Image
This smartphone screen capture shows a false emergency alert sent from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency system on Saturday.

Most emergency sirens, which are triggered by a separate system, never went off. Mr. Miyagi said they are investigating why only some residents received text alerts, and why some sirens went off.

The system for sending out emergency alerts has now been changed to a system with two people involved, so the same kind of mistake couldn't happen again, state officials said.

“We’ve implemented changes already to ensure that it becomes a redundant process, so it won’t be a single individual,” Mr. Miyagi said.

But, for 38 minutes, the people who received the alerts on their phones got no notification that it had been a false alarm. For many, panic took over.

Michael Barstis was reading a Scooby-Doo book with his two children in their bedroom when his wife appeared at the door, a concerned look on her face. “Honey, there is a thunderstorm warning,” she said, handing over her blaring cellphone. “We need to take shelter.”

Mr. Barstis froze when he read the text of the alert—a missile was headed their way—and quickly caught onto his wife’s act. They didn’t want to scare the children.

Then the family dove behind a couch in the living room and waited. It was more than half an hour before they heard an official all-clear message.

“We just sat there silently praying, hugging and kissing our kids,” said Mr. Barstis, 42, the general manager of a construction company. “Somebody needs to be held accountable for this.”

A Trump administration official said that the alert system was federally owned, but that it had been used on this occasion exclusively by state officials. The Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the false alarm.

At the Saturday afternoon press conference, Gov. David Ige apologized to the public.

“I’m sorry for the pain and confusion that anyone might have experienced,” Mr. Ige said. “I’m too very angry and disappointed.”


In response to building tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, Hawaii last year brought back attack-warning sirens that had last been in use in the 1980s.

The state has set up tones to be blasted from about 400 sirens that were installed during World War II and are different from those the state uses for tsunami and hurricane warnings.

But in most places on Saturday, the sirens didn’t sound, which contributed to the confusion. Instead, resident found out about the warning at different times via text alert, the radio or calls from friends.

John Takara, a 66-year-old resident of Honolulu, had just fried himself an egg when the phone rang. It was a neighbor telling him about the missile warning. He had to take shelter immediately.

Mr. Takara was skeptical. He heard no sirens, which had gone off just a few days earlier during a monthly drill. He scanned the television for updates. At first, all he saw was regular programming, until he landed on a local news station, with a voice over warning of a ballistic attack.

He decided to take shelter on their first floor, which is built into a hillside and has a lava-rock foundation.

“My wife started filling jugs of water,” he said. “I kept yelling, ‘We don’t have time! Get down here!’ ”

After about half an hour, they watched on TV as the state’s emergency-management agency announced that the alert had been a false alarm.

The text alerts were also inconsistent, residents said. Mr. Takara didn’t receive one, though he said he was signed up for them. Neither did Megan Arita, 31, of Oahu. Her husband did receive one, however. She woke up as he said, “Oh, my God,” and showed her the alert on his phone.

Vern T. Miyagi, administrator for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, spoke at a Nov. 28, 2017, press conference about a newly activated missile-attack warning system. On Saturday, Mr. Miyagi said a false alert was triggered when the wrong computer button was clicked.
Vern T. Miyagi, administrator for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, spoke at a Nov. 28, 2017, press conference about a newly activated missile-attack warning system. On Saturday, Mr. Miyagi said a false alert was triggered when the wrong computer button was clicked. Photo: marco garcia/Reuters
They grabbed their two pugs, threw them into the car, and headed for Ms. Arita’s parents’ house. The couple didn’t even stop to close the front door behind them.

As Ms. Arita drove to her parents’ house, she heard no sirens. One warning on the radio was quickly followed by regular music programming. She saw neighbors out casually walking their dogs to them, and yelled warnings out the window.

“There are just so many things that were very wrong with the situation and how it was handled,” she said.

At Ms. Arita’s parents’ house, they quickly realized their emergency supplies were insufficient: A couple of bottles of coconut water, two jugs of water and a jar of peanut butter for eight people. After about half-an-hour, a friend found the news on Twitter that it had been a false alarm.

Ms. Arita and her husband drove home, and began shopping for emergency supplies on Amazon.

Mr. Miyagi didn’t offer an explanation for why more than half an hour passed before a notification was sent to cellphones that the alert had been a false alarm. “One thing we have to work on more is the cancellation notice,” he said.




Ex-Obama defense official on Hawaii false alarm: 'Thank God the President was playing golf'

Brandon Carter01/13/18 02:15 PM EST
A former Defense Department official under former President Obama reacted to the false alert that a ballistic missile was headed toward Hawaii on Saturday by saying “thank God the President was playing golf.”

Patrick Granfield, a former strategic communications director at the Pentagon, posted the tweet after Hawaii officials declared the emergency alert was a false alarm.


Critics went after Trump for being at his Trump International Golf Course in Florida when the false alarm alert was sent out on Saturday.

The false alarm came amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear program and continued testing of ballistic missiles.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) accused Trump of not taking the threat of North Korea's nuclear program seriously during a phone interview with CNN minutes after the false alarm.

Gabbard had posted a tweet saying that "there is no incoming missile to Hawaii” and adding she confirmed with officials that the alert, sent to mobile devices and televisions across Hawaii, was a false alarm.

U.S. Pacific Command spokesman Cmdr. David Benham said in a statement that the military "has detected no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii" and that an "earlier message was sent in error."

Another alert was sent out on Hawaii's emergency system 38 minutes later calling the initial alert a false alarm.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... 1515870995



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LOOK AT THIS STUPID LONG GAP BETWEEN "Hey nuclear missile incoming" vs "Sorry we screwed up." @Hawaii_EMA
Image



Sara Donchey

@KPRC2Sara
This was my phone when I woke up just now. I'm in Honolulu, #Hawaii and my family is on the North Shore. They were hiding in the garage. My mom and sister were crying. It was a false alarm, but betting a lot of people are shaken. @KPRC2
12:58 PM - Jan 13, 2018




The outrage and hysteria was understandable. People of Hawaii reported their experiences, their shock, and their disbelief when the whole thing turned out to be a technical error. The event cause cognitive dissonance across the islands — people were shaking with adrenaline and suddenly it was called off.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 19, 2018 1:52 pm

Would the Air Force Let Airman Trump Near a Nuclear Weapon?
By STEVEN BUSER

JAN. 17, 2018


As a psychiatrist for the United States Air Force, one of my responsibilities was evaluating the mental stability of airmen who handled nuclear weapons, using the standards laid out in what is called the Nuclear Personnel Reliability Program. There is no need to justify why our military would take every precaution necessary to ensure that the men and women in uniform handling nuclear weapons were fit to do so, whether they were in charge of a missile silo or loading nuclear bombs onto aircraft — or giving the orders to them, on up the chain of command. Strangely, the commander-in-chief, the one who would decide when and how to use those weapons, is the only individual in the chain who is not subject to the ongoing certification under the program.

According to the program, or P.R.P., personnel who handle nuclear weapons are held to higher standards of physical and mental readiness than other personnel, and rightfully so. The Department of Defense Directive 5210.42 states: “Only those personnel who have demonstrated the highest degree of individual reliability for allegiance, trustworthiness, conduct, behavior, and responsibility shall be allowed to perform duties associated with nuclear weapons, and they shall be continuously evaluated for adherence to P.R.P. standards.”

On Tuesday the White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, gave the president a clean bill of health. And no doubt, by many standards, Mr. Trump is in decent shape. But the standards for a person’s physical and mental health are a different matter from his fitness to oversee our nuclear arsenal. What if President Trump were, instead, Airman Trump, and was to be assessed under the program’s guidelines; would I certify him as “P.R.P. ready” to work in the vicinity of nuclear weapons?

I have not had the opportunity to examine the president personally, but warning signs abound. What if I had reliable outside information that Airman Trump displayed erratic emotions? That I saw very clearly that he was engaging in cyberbullying on Twitter? That he had repeatedly made untruthful or highly distorted statements? That his language implied he engaged in sexually abusive behavior? That he appeared paranoid about being surveilled or persecuted by others, that he frequently disregarded or violated the rights of others?

These are the sorts of things that set off alarms for Air Force psychiatrists. I certainly could not certify him as “P.R.P. ready” without more extensive psychological evaluation.

It does not take a former Air Force psychiatrist to point out that our country finds itself in a place unlike any we’ve ever been before. Saturday morning’s alarm in Hawaii, as residents read alerts that incoming ballistic missiles were on their way, is a wakeup call to the very real danger we’re facing. Global tension and angst are significantly heightened.

We’ve been here a few times before, but unlike those other times our commander-in-chief adds, without equivocation, to this angst almost daily with his words and actions. We have always assumed that the person at the top has the mental fitness to meet whatever standards the Air Force set for the rest of the chain of command. What keeps me up at night? The realization that, at the worst possible time, we have a chief executive who I believe would probably fail the P.R.P.

The topic of presidential fitness and cognitive decline has always been a legitimate issue. The ability for the Executive Office to function effectively and without exposing the American people to undue danger relies on the mental faculties of the one person inhabiting its walls. Former President Jimmy Carter pointed this out in an article he wrote for The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1994, in which he warned that our country is in “continuing danger” from the possibility that a president could become disabled “particularly by a neurological illness.” Revelations that President Ronald Reagan may have had early-stage Alzheimer’s while he was president add to these concerns.

It’s unlikely that the military will act on its own to require the president to submit to an Air Force psychiatrist’s evaluation. But there are other options. A bill in the House, with support in the Senate, called the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017, explicitly prevents any president from initiating a nuclear first strike without Congressional approval. This should be common sense for any politician to support, because it assures that the checks and balances intended by the framers of the Constitution remain intact. But equally important, it remedies a glaring failure within the nuclear chain of command and mitigates one of the greatest dangers of our nuclear ages: the possibility of an unhinged president executing a calamitous decision that endangers millions of Americans, and potentially millions of others around the globe.

No president, including Mr. Trump, should have the unilateral power to begin a nuclear war. Congress must protect the American people, and taking away the option of an impulsive first strike nuclear attack is a clear and sane way to prevent a dangerous and insane result.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/opin ... ght-region


Former nuclear launch officer speaks out about Trump fears

EVERY day for two years, Peter Hefley would drive through Wyoming farmland to work, hoping he wouldn’t be called upon to act.

The nuclear launch officer, then 25, was one of two people who worked in an Air Force command and control centre deep underground from 2005 to 2007, maintaining a squadron of 50 of the world’s most devastating missiles and waiting for instructions to launch.

“If you imagine a hardened bunker 60 feet below the ground, that’s what we were doing,” he told news.com.au.

“Each [missile] had up to three nuclear warheads on it. Any one of those warheads would just destroy a city regardless of size.”

But while he used to have confidence in the fact Commander-in-Chief at the time, George W. Bush, would follow an escalation process from diplomacy to a declaration of war and use of conventional weapons first, now he has no such confidence.

“It’s fear,” he said when asked what led him to speak out given his critical former role. “It’s being afraid that not only can I picture myself, now there are kids doing what I did and the atmosphere is completely different.

“I’m nervous as a citizen because this is scary. Something that can devastate a good portion of the globe is on the hairpin trigger.”

Peter Hefley was one of two people responsible for launching nuclear missiles between 2005 and 2007. He has since spoken out against the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review.


Trump supporters claim his hard line approach is acknowledging a global reality and has seen results in North Korea, but critics claims he is bringing the world closer to nuclear war. Picture: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File.


The former college space hacker who ended up on the Air Force’s missile program said he now wants people to realise just how quickly a disaster could occur.

“The most important thing everybody can understand is how quick that process can happen because everybody is trained to do it as fast as possible,” he said about the system that can take just four minutes from the President’s order until the first missiles leave their silos.

The stark warning comes as a leaked draft of the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) showed plans to increase “low yield weapons” that will not rely on host nations for support and are designed to ensure a “prompt response”.

Separately, US Air Force psychiatrist Steven Buser told the New York Times “warning signs abound” when thinking about whether Trump would pass the military’s strict Personnel Reliability Program (PRP) for fitness to serve in that role.

While the White House has said the NPR does not represent official policy, the report describes “low yield weapons” — the same force as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as a “low cost and near term modification that will help counter any mistaken perception of an exploitable ‘gap’ in US regional deterrence capabilities”.

Critics, including Mr Hefley, argue it could lead to a terrifying proliferation of the weapons the world is supposed to be eradicating, in the context of an unstable political environment.

“This is the first time I’ve heard in my lifetime [an argument for] restocking the nuclear armament. Everything has been a take down because they realise the devastation. This is ‘let’s add to this and let them do more things that will let us use more nuclear weapons’.”

North Korea has continued to test ICBMs but has not yet managed to attach a nuclear warhead to one. Picture: Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File.


Trump and Kim Jong Un have traded childish insults via the media over the size of their “nuclear buttons”. Picture: AP Photo/Ahn Young-join, File.


The comments come after President Trump’s escalating rhetoric with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and brags that his “nuclear button” is bigger and readily available. Trump supporters claim his hardline approach has helped force North Korean concessions including diplomatic talks with South Korea.

Hefley is one of 17 former nuclear launch officers who has recently signed an open letter stating President Trump is “worse than we feared” when it comes to his temperament to be Commander-in-Chief.

Global Zero executive director Derek Johnson, who wants to see nuclear weapons abolished, said the Nuclear Posture Review’s new stance takes the country closer to the “point of no return”.

“Trump’s plan to develop so-called ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons and loosen restrictions on their use is a dramatic departure from longstanding US policy that makes nuclear war more likely. The world is about to get a whole lot more dangerous,” he said.

“Once we cross the nuclear threshold, all bets are off. If a nuclear weapon is used, nobody on the receiving end is going to stop to measure the mushroom cloud before retaliating. This plan paves a road to disaster.”
http://www.news.com.au/world/former-nuc ... 782780d25c
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 3:09 pm

Frank Jannuzi‏

I don't spook easily. I was trained to do military analysis, specializing in East Asia -- China, North Korea, Vietnam. I am more worried today than at any point since 1994 DPRK nuclear crisis. US stands on the precipice of a catastrophic mistake on the Korean Peninsula.
8:32 PM - 30 Jan 2018

Trump Administration is now CLEARLY marching toward war on the Korean Peninsula. Tonights plaintive op-ed from Victor Cha -- Trump's discarded Ambassadorial nominee -- makes plain that Trump plan to launch an attack on North Korea that is both unnecessary and poorly considered.

Unnecessary, because DPRK is today, and has been for past decade, DETERRED from attacking the United States and allies. North Korea is not suicidal, and the only circumstance in which the DPRK would use nuclear weapons against us is as a last gasp under determined US attack

Poorly considered, because the logic behind a "bloody nose" US attack on North Korea assumes that DPRK will respond "rationally" to a limited US strike, and NOT unleash a massive artillery, missile, and/or nuclear response.

IF DPRK is to be COUNTED ON to act rationally AFTER a US attack -- deterred by our nuclear arsenal -- why does that deterrence not work now?

Reality is that time is on OUR side with DPRK. We hold the cards. Sanctions are already imposing a cost. We can strengthen our defenses, enhance US and allied capabilities, interdict DPRK illicit activities, and win this conflict without firing a shot.

Americans must NOT be seduced AGAIN by a President who offers up a bogeyman supposedly posing an unacceptable threat to our security. Trump himself claims to have been against the disastrous Iraq war - a war based on lies and half-truths.

The American people know in their gut that North Korea is a small, weak country. The only way we end up in a war with DPRK is if WE start it. We won the Cold War by following a strategy rooted in optimism about our soft power capabilities and realism about our hard power.

If we could defeat the USSR without risking a nuclear exchange, surely we have it within our means to defeat North Korea. Trump's inept lurch toward war on the Korean Peninsula would be a march of folly.

Mansfield taught me not to impugn motives -- so I won't expound at length on the risk that Trump is interested in a WAR with North Korea to distract the nation from the Mueller investigation into the rot at the core of his campaign. But people should ask themselves -- why now?

Why is Trump beating war drums when his policy of "maximum pressure AND engagement" has only been in place for a few months and is arguably showing results? The whole POINT of Trump's policy is to persuade DPRK OVER TIME to change direction.

When a GOP, conservative, Bush White Houee veteran like Victor Cha (and his former boss Mike Green), former CINCPAC and DNI Admiral Dennis Blair, and former SecDef Bill Perry, ALL judge a military attack on North Korea to be folly, we should listen.

I know TWITTER democratizes; tends to honor ideas more than expertise. I am ok /that. But I take pride in 30 yrs of work - 10 in intelligence, 15 on Capital Hill, and 5 with NGOs including Amnesty International and Mansfield Foundation - on East Asian security and human rights.

I don't sound the alarm lightly. I've lived and worked through military crises before; 1994 DPRK, Tiananmen, civil war in Burma and Cambodia, insurgencies in Thailand and Philippines. We can prevent "Trump's Iraq," but only if the American people learn lessons from past mistakes


We are being manipulated by Trump - or at least he is trying. Tonight's SOTU, with emotional appeals on behalf of US college student and DPRK refugee, was classic propaganda -- demonize and dehumanize our enemy to justify the unjustifiable.

don't fall for it....
The DPRK has possessed nuclear weapons for a decade. As dangerous as that is -- and yes, we MUST have a long-term strategy to eventually denuclearize the Korean Peninsula - North Korea is today, and will be tomorrow, DETERRED by overwhelming US power.

The American people should have CONFIDENCE in our military, and should never start a war that is unnecessary -- especially one that carries the very real risk of a catastrophic nuclear exchange that could claim the lives of millions.

Looking for an exit ramp from the road to another Korean War? We assembled a diverse group of young scholars and asked them to take a fresh look at a problem 7 decades in the making. They generated lots of ideas. Let’s test some. http://mansfieldfdn.org/mfdn2011/wp-con ... g-2017.pdf

Avoiding a new war with North Korean begins with restoring hope and confidence - HOPE for peace, security, and denuclearization of the entire Korean Peninsula (eventually); and CONFIDENCE in our ability (with allies) to DETER DPRK aggression and MANAGE the emerging ICBM threat.

For suite of innovative ideas to mitigate dangers posed by DPRK, check out http://mansfieldfdn.org/mfdn2011/wp-con ... g-2017.pdf

War should always be last resort. We have barely begun to use many of the tools available to help us halt, roll back, and eventually eliminate the North’s nuclear weapons program.
https://twitter.com/FrankJannuzi/status ... 8284880897
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby SonicG » Thu Feb 01, 2018 9:04 pm

Thanks SLAD, I was going to post about this in the coming war with China thread...Trump mentioned that the US needs a 'uniting event' almost as if he is pinning for 911 Le Deux or a chance at war....Or maybe he means disclosure...ha-ha...But a "bloody nose" strike to reap the whirlwhind it unleashes? No bueno...

Last month three sources told The Telegraph of London that the White House was drawing up military options as diplomacy had failed to curb the rogue regime.

“The Pentagon is trying to find options that would allow them to punch the North Koreans in the nose, get their attention and show that we’re serious,” a former US security official told the paper.

Mr Cha wrote he shared the “hope” that military action would force Kim Jong-un to retreat, however “there is a point at which hope must give in to logic”.

“If we believe that Kim is undeterrable without such a strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from responding in kind? And if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder, which is premised on an adversary’s rational understanding of signals and deterrence?”
http://www.news.com.au/world/north-amer ... 703d75d39b
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 02, 2018 10:41 am

White House Wants Pentagon to Offer More Options on North Korea
By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPERFEB. 1, 2018

What Is a ‘Bloody Nose’ Strategy in North Korea?

Many in the Trump administration argue a missile strike against North Korea could prevent nuclear war, but opponents of the strategy say it's a dangerous gamble.

By NATALIE RENEAU and AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER

on Publish Date February 1, 2018. .

WASHINGTON — The White House has grown frustrated in recent weeks by what it considers the Pentagon’s reluctance to provide President Trump with options for a military strike against North Korea, according to officials, the latest sign of a deepening split in the administration over how to confront the nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong-un.

The national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, believes that for Mr. Trump’s warnings to North Korea to be credible, the United States must have well-developed military plans, according to those officials.

But the Pentagon, they say, is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically. Giving the president too many options, the officials said, could increase the odds that he will act.

The tensions bubbled to the surface this week with the disclosure that the White House had abandoned plans to nominate a prominent Korea expert, Victor D. Cha, as ambassador to South Korea. Mr. Cha suggested that he was sidelined because he warned administration officials against a “preventive” military strike, which, he later wrote, could spiral “into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans.”

But the divisions go back months, officials said. When North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile in July that experts concluded was capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States, the National Security Council convened a conference call that included Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.


After General McMaster left the room, Mr. Mattis and Mr. Tillerson continued to speak, not realizing that other participants were still on the line. The officials familiar with the matter overheard them complaining about a series of meetings that the National Security Council had set up to consider options for North Korea — signs, Mr. Tillerson said, that it was becoming overly aggressive.

For now, the frustration at the White House appears to be limited to senior officials rather than Mr. Trump himself. But the president has shown impatience with his military leaders on other issues, notably the debate over whether to deploy additional American troops to Afghanistan.

As they examine the most effective way of giving credibility to Mr. Trump’s threat of “fire and fury,” officials are considering the feasibility of a preventive strike that could include disabling a missile on the launchpad or destroying North Korea’s entire nuclear infrastructure. American officials are also said to be considering covert means of disabling the nuclear and missile programs.

While General McMaster also favors a diplomatic solution to the impasse, officials said, he emphasizes to colleagues that past efforts to negotiate with North Korea have forced the United States to make unacceptable concessions.

The Pentagon has a different view. Mr. Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., argue forcefully for using diplomacy. They have repeatedly warned, in meetings and on video conference calls, that there are few, if any, military options that would not provoke retaliation from North Korea, according to officials at the Defense Department.

Representatives of Mr. Mattis and General Dunford denied that they have slow-walked options to the White House.

The Pentagon press secretary, Dana W. White, said that Mr. Mattis “regularly provides the president with a deep arsenal of military options” and that reports of a delay were “false.” General Dunford’s press secretary, Col. Patrick S. Ryder, said: “General Dunford regularly provides his best military advice in a timely and responsive manner. Suggestions to the contrary are inaccurate.”

Photo

A prominent Korea expert, Victor D. Cha, suggested that his nomination as an ambassador to South Korea had been sidelined because he warned administration officials against a “preventive” military strike. Credit Yonhap, via Associated Press
During a visit in October to the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, Mr. Mattis confronted the central contradiction in the Trump administration’s bellicose language: Virtually any military option would put the sprawling city of Seoul, with its population of 10 million, in the cross hairs of North Korea’s artillery guns.

At times, South Korea’s defense minister, Song Young-moo, appeared to be giving Mr. Mattis a guided tour of how a strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities would quickly trigger extensive retaliation.

Even the most limited strike, the so-called bloody nose option, risks what one Defense Department official called an unacceptably high number of casualties. Mr. Cha, writing in The Washington Post, said the premise of such a strike — that it would jolt Mr. Kim into recognizing that the United States was serious, and draw him back to the bargaining table — was flawed.

“If we believe that Kim is undeterrable without such a strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from responding in kind?” Mr. Cha wrote. “And if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder, which is premised on an adversary’s rational understanding of signals and deterrence?”

Friends said Mr. Cha pressed that case in meetings at the Pentagon, the United States Pacific Command, the State Department and the National Security Council. He passed along articles critical of preventive military action by two colleagues: John J. Hamre, the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Michael J. Green, a senior fellow at the center who worked in the George W. Bush administration, as did Mr. Cha.

Mr. Green warned against a preventive strike in testimony on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said there appeared to be little support for it, even among normally hawkish Republicans like Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

Even the White House has struggled to send a consistent message. In the week after Mr. Trump issued his threat to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, Stephen K. Bannon, then his chief strategist, told a progressive journalist, “There’s no military solution. Forget it.”

“Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mr. Bannon’s bluntness angered other White House officials and hastened his exit from the White House. But there is evidence that General McMaster shares those concerns. Asked by a reporter in August whether there was any military option that would not put Seoul in North Korea’s cross hairs, he paused briefly, then said, “No.”

With as many as 8,000 artillery pieces and rocket launchers positioned along its border with the South, North Korea could rain up to 300,000 rounds on the South in the first hour of a counterattack.

While that arsenal is of limited range and could be destroyed in days, North Korea would still have time to cause widespread destruction. In a rare appearance last year on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Mattis warned that war with North Korea would be “catastrophic” — “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

That does not mean the military has not begun preparing for that possibility. At multiple Army bases across the country this month, more than 1000 reserve officers are practicing how to set up so-called mobilization centers, which move reservists overseas in a hurry.

But as the military gears up, Mr. Tillerson continues to look for a diplomatic channel to North Korea. State Department officials say the United States has far from exhausted its nonmilitary options for pressuring Pyongyang. It could, for example, push to expel North Korea from the United Nations or interdict ships that it suspects are violating sanctions against the government.

Neither Mr. Tillerson nor Mr. Mattis has broken with the White House on the issue of a preventive strike. That is because for now, they still view it as a useful tool in deterring North Korea, according to people briefed by the administration. More important, they continue to be confident that, despite their anxieties, cooler heads with eventually prevail.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/us/p ... &smtyp=cur
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 08, 2018 4:54 pm

Here’s what war with North Korea would look like

A full-blown war with North Korea wouldn’t be as bad as you think. It would be much, much worse.
Image
Yochi DreazenFeb 8, 2018, 7:39am EST
Joe Wilson for Vox
Late last September, I moderated a discussion about North Korea with retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, whose 37-year military career included a stint running NATO, and Michèle Flournoy, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, who has helped shape US policy toward North Korea since 1993.

It was a chilling conversation. Stavridis said there was at least a 10 percent chance of a nuclear war between the US and North Korea, and a 20 to 30 percent chance of a conventional conflict that could kill a million people or more. Flournoy said President Trump’s tough talk about North Korea — which has included deriding Kim Jong Un as “Little Rocket Man” and threatening to rain “fire and fury” down on his country — made it “much more likely now that one side or the other will misread what was intended as a show of commitment or a show of force.”

The Trump administration, for its part, seems more confident in its ability to manage North Korea with precision. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is pushing something known inside the White House as a “bloody nose” strategy of responding to a North Korean provocation with a set of limited US military strikes. McMaster seems to believe that Kim would passively absorb the attack without hitting back and risking all-out war.

Millions — plural — would die.
I covered the Iraq War from Baghdad. I saw the aftermath of a conflict built atop sunny scenarios and rosy thinking. I’ve seen the cost of wars that the American people were not prepared for and did not fully understand. The rhetoric around North Korea is raising those same alarm bells for me. For all the talk of nuclear exchanges and giant buttons, there has been little realistic discussion of what a war on the Korean Peninsula might mean, how it could escalate, what commitments would be required, and what sacrifices would be demanded.

So I’ve spent the past month posing those questions to more than a dozen former Pentagon officials, CIA analysts, US military officers, and think tank experts, as well as to a retired South Korean general who spent his entire professional life preparing to fight the North. They’ve all said variants of the same thing: There is a genuine risk of a war on the Korean Peninsula that would involve the use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Several estimated that millions — plural — would die.

Even more frightening, most of the people I spoke to said they believed Kim would use nuclear weapons against South Korea in the initial stages of the fighting — not just as a desperate last resort.
Image
Danush Parvaneh/Vox; AP Images
“This would be nothing like Iraq,” Flournoy told me. “It’s not that the North Korean military is so good. It’s that North Korea has nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction — and is now in a situation where they might have real incentives to use them.”

The experts I spoke to all stressed that Kim could devastate Seoul without even needing to use his weapons of mass destruction. The North Korean military has an enormous number of rocket launchers and artillery pieces within range of Seoul. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates that Kim could hammer the South Korean capital with an astonishing 10,000 rockets per minute — and that such a barrage could kill more than 300,000 South Koreans in the opening days of the conflict. That’s all without using a single nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.

And retired South Korean Gen. In-Bum Chun, who spent 40 years in uniform thinking about a confrontation with North Korea, underscored that Kim also has a different kind of weapon: 25 million people — including 1.2 million active-duty troops and several million reservists — who have been “indoctrinated since childhood with the belief that Kim and his family are literal gods whose government must be protected at all costs.”

“You’re talking about people who have basically been brainwashed their entire lives,” Chun said. “It would be like what you saw on Okinawa during World War II, where Japanese civilians and soldiers were all willing to fight to the death. This would be a hard and bloody war.”

What follows is a guide to what a conflict with North Korea might look like. War is inherently unpredictable: It’s possible Kim would use every type of weapon of mass destruction he possesses, and it’s possible he wouldn’t use any of them.

But many leading experts fear the worst. And if all of this sounds frightening, it should. A new war on the Korean Peninsula wouldn’t be as bad as you think. It would be much, much worse.

Destroying Kim’s nuclear arsenal would require a ground invasion and facing Kim’s chemical and biological weapons

The official position of the Trump administration, like that of its predecessors, is that North Korea’s nuclear program is unacceptable and that Pyongyang has to give up all its nuclear weapons. If the US and South Korea went to war with the North, their key strategic goal would be to capture or destroy all of Pyongyang’s nuclear sites, as well as the bases that house its long-range missiles.

In a startlingly blunt letter to Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) last October, Rear Adm. Michael Dumont, speaking on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the “only way to ‘locate and destroy — with complete certainty — all components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs’ is through a ground invasion.”
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Danush Parvaneh/Vox; AP Images
Estimates of the exact numbers of US troops that would take part in a push north vary widely, but current and former military planners uniformly believe it would require vastly more forces than took part in the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan.

A South Korean military white paper from 2016, for instance, said the US would need to deploy 690,000 ground troops to South Korea if war broke out. Bruce Bennett, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation who has spent decades studying North Korea generally and the Kim family specifically, believes those numbers are on the high side, but he thinks the US would need to send at least 200,000 troops into North Korea. By way of comparison, that would be significantly more troops than the US had in either Iraq or Afghanistan at the peaks of those two long wars.
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Javier Zarracina/Vox
The 2016 assessment says the Pentagon would also need to send 2,000 warplanes and other aircraft to South Korea. The US hasn’t had that much airpower deployed to a single conflict since Vietnam.

The experts I spoke to believe Kim and his generals know that US ground forces are better trained and equipped than North Korean troops, and that North Korea’s aging fleet of 1,300 Soviet-era warplanes is no match for Washington’s state-of-the-art stealth fighters and other jets. So what would happen if US and South Korean troops started pouring into North Korea while American planes launched wave after wave of airstrikes?

The consensus view is that Kim would try to level the playing field by using his vast arsenal of chemical weapons, which is believed to be the biggest and most technologically advanced in the world. (Kim is estimated to have between 2,500 and 5,000 metric tons of deadly nerve agents like sarin, which can cause paralysis and, ultimately, death.)

With so many artillery pieces and rocket launchers trained on Seoul, Kim has the ability to quickly blanket the densely packed city with huge amounts of nerve agents. The human toll would be staggeringly high: The military historian Reid Kirby estimated last June that a sustained sarin attack could kill up to 2.5 million people in Seoul alone, while injuring nearly 7 million more. Men, women, and children would very literally choke to death in the streets of one of the world’s wealthiest and most vibrant cities. It would be mass murder on a scale rarely seen in human history.
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Javier Zarracina/Vox
Kim also has large quantities of VX, an even deadlier chemical weapon, and has already shown a willingness, and ability, to use it against civilian targets abroad. Last February, two women trained by North Korean intelligence agents walked up to Kim’s estranged half-brother Kim Jong Nam, while the 45-year-old walked through an airport in Malaysia, and smeared his face with VX. Authorities there said he suffered a “very painful” death from his exposure to the nerve agent.

Retired Lt. Gen. Chip Gregson, the Pentagon’s top Asia official from 2009 to 2011, says the attack was a vivid illustration of the North Korean chemical weapons program’s technological sophistication — and of what may face US and South Korean troops if war were to break out.

“VX is the worst of the worst,” Gregson told me. “It’s a crowd killer. It’s odorless, colorless, and doesn’t dissipate quickly. The fact that they were able to use it so precisely — to kill only one person and not even injure the two handlers — indicates a high degree of technical skill and a clear willingness to use a weapon of mass destruction against civilian targets. That needs to be factored into the equation when we think about what Kim would do to preempt an attack or retaliate for one.”

The Pentagon already assumes that its airbases in and around South Korea would be among the first places Kim tried to hit with chemical weapons like sarin. US military officials don’t think North Korea would necessarily succeed in killing many of the pilots and other troops stationed there, all of whom are equipped with gas masks and other protective gear. But they worry an attack could nevertheless make it significantly harder for the US to launch air raids against the North by causing panic and chaos on the bases that house the American warplanes, bombers, and troops.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jan-Marc Jouas, the former deputy commander of US forces in South Korea, said the initial phases of any offensive against North Korea depend on American and South Korean planes being able to hit Kim’s nuclear facilities, military bases, chemical and biological weapons caches, radar systems, and missile defense arrays.

The air campaign — which would dwarf the “shock and awe” of the Iraq War in size and scope — would be designed to decimate North Korea’s ground forces and destroy the thousands of artillery pieces [img]trained on the South Korean capital before they could be used to level Seoul.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_ ... n43sec.jpg[/img]
Danush Parvaneh/Vox; AP Images
Washington would also try to kill senior North Korean military commanders and government officials, including Kim. (So-called “decapitation” strikes are part of the current US and South Korean war plan for a conflict with North Korea, OPLAN 5015, which explicitly talks about targeting the country’s top leadership.)

“Air power is dependent on the number of sorties that can be flown,” Jouas told me, using the military’s term for an individual air combat mission. “And it’s a lot harder to generate sorties if your airfield is under attack.”

Jouas said Air Force personnel conduct chemical weapons drills where they practice doing their jobs in gas masks and other equipment they’d wear if the bases were under actual attack. They try to game out all the various ways North Korea could hit the facilities, and to prepare accordingly. It isn’t easy.

“We anticipate conventional attacks, we anticipate chemical attacks, we anticipate cyberattacks, and we anticipate North Korean special operations forces being inserted into the bases,” he told me. “We’d still be able to fly — and to ultimately defeat North Korea — but there would be an unquestionable impact on our operations.”

Gregson thinks Kim wouldn’t only use his chemical weapons against military targets in South Korea. The Pentagon has a sizable military presence in neighboring Japan, and the island of Guam is a US territory that is home to more than 163,000 American citizens. Both are well within range of Kim’s missiles and rockets — and Gregson expects both would be hit.

North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end.
Andrew Weber, formerly the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, told me that the US and South Korea would also need to be prepared for Kim to use biological weapons against both military and civilian targets.

North Korea’s arsenal is thought to include smallpox, yellow fever, anthrax, hemorrhagic fever, and even plague. They are some of the most frightening substances on earth, and Weber expects some of them to be used against South Korean ports, airfields, and cities as a way of killing large numbers of civilians and troops while causing terror on a nationwide scale.

“We would expect to see cocktails of fast-acting biological agents designed to stop troops in their tracks and regular infectious agents that would take more time to kill people,” he told me. “There would be a significant military impact, and a significant psychological one. It’s hard to overstate just how frightening these types of weapons are.”

In an October 2017 report, researchers from Harvard’s Belfer Center noted that minute quantities of anthrax “equivalent to a few bottles of wine” could kill up to half the population of a densely populated city like Seoul. North Korea could theoretically fire missiles with payloads of anthrax or other biological weapons into South Korea, or use drones to disperse the lethal substances from the air.

The researchers wrote that Kim could also have some of his citizens secretly bring the weapons into the South:

North Korea has 200,000 special forces; even a handful of those special forces armed with BW would be enough to devastate South Korea. What is alarming about human vectors is that they do not need sophisticated training or technology to spread BW amongst the targets, and they are difficult to detect in advance of an attack. It is theoretically possible that North Korean sleeper agents disguised as cleaning and disinfection personnel could disperse BW agents with backpack sprayers. Another possibility is that North Korean agents will introduce BW into water supplies for major metropolitan areas.

In 2011, Weber helped design a war game centered on a simulated North Korean biological weapons attack on the South. The exercise, Able Response, brought together hundreds of military and civilian officials from the US and South Korea. The goals were to figure out the best ways to detect an attack, identify what substance had been used, limit the spread of the virus, and then rush vaccines and other medical care to the infected to save as many lives as possible.

The exercises led to concrete policy changes, including closer coordination between the South Korean military and the country’s public health system. US bases in South Korea received new environmental surveillance systems designed to quickly detect the presence of a biological agent. All US troops in South Korea are vaccinated against anthrax and smallpox (South Korean troops aren’t, to the consternation of Weber and other US officials).

Still, Weber said his main takeaway was the near impossibility of preventing biological weapons from killing an astonishing number of people. The death toll in each year’s exercise was often close to a million. In some cases, it was significantly higher because the infection spread to Japan or other nearby countries.

“It only takes one or two people to deliver bioweapons, and tiny quantities of a bacteria or virus can cause a massive number of casualties,” he told me. “You wouldn’t need a missile. You’d need a backpack.”
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Joe Wilson for Vox
The scary logic behind a North Korean nuclear attack

There’s a giant question that looms over any discussion of North Korea’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons: Would Kim actually be willing to use one?

North Korea is thought to have about 50 nukes. The US, by contrast, has an astonishing 6,800 nuclear weapons (surpassed only by Russia, which has an estimated 7,000 weapons). Trump — or one of his successors — could respond to a North Korean nuclear strike by destroying every major North Korean city in a matter of hours.
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Javier Zarracina/Vox
Experts inside and outside the US government who study North Korea say that Kim is a rational leader with a singular focus on maintaining control of his country. They don’t think he’s stupid, or suicidal. And for a long time, they believed that Kim would only use his nuclear weapons if he were facing military defeat and the imminent collapse of his government. It would be the last gasp of a dying regime, one determined to kill as many of its enemies as possible before the end came.

Those assessments have now changed. Most of the experts I spoke to believe North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end. And most of them believe Kim would be making a rational decision, not a crazy or suicidal one, if he gave the launch order.

One of the best explanations for why came from Bennett, the RAND researcher. He’s made more than 100 trips to the Korean Peninsula and interviewed an array of North Korean defectors. He also jokes that he’s “kinda, sorta” made it into North Korea itself, including once walking through a newly discovered tunnel that North Korean troops had dug beneath the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea. He remembers that the walls were covered with graffiti praising Kim.

Bennett began his career at RAND during the height of the Cold War and believes it’s impossible to understand why Kim would go nuclear without also understanding why Soviet leaders were prepared to do so.

“In the Cold War, we specifically talked about a logic called ‘use them or lose them,’ which referred to the fact that the Soviet Union understood that the first goal of an American preemptive attack would be to knock out their nuclear weapons before they could be fired at the US,” Bennett told me. “Now think about how Kim is looking at the world. He knows that any US and South Korean strike would be designed to destroy or capture his nuclear weapons. That means he’d need to either use them early or risk losing them altogether.”

The vast bulk of the US troops and equipment would need to come by boat.
There’s another big-picture reason Kim might decide to go nuclear: a Cold War-era concept known as “decoupling.”

In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was much stronger militarily than Germany, France, or the other countries of Western Europe. The US had formally committed to protecting those nations from a Soviet invasion, and Bennett told me that American military planners were prepared to use small-scale tactical nuclear weapons against the advancing Russian troops to stop the assault.

That entire calculus began to change once the Soviet Union developed long-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching the continental US. European leaders openly wondered how far Washington would be willing to go to protect their countries from the Soviet Union given the new risks to the American homeland.

“By the time you get to the late ’50s, the French in particular are saying, ‘Wait a minute, if the US uses nuclear weapons against Soviet ground forces in Europe, the Soviets are going to fire nuclear weapons at the US. Is the US prepared to trade New York City for Paris?’” Bennett told me.

That’s why North Korea’s new generation of long-range missiles capable of hitting the mainland US is such a game changer.
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Javier Zarracina/Vox
The North Korean constitution says the country’s ultimate aim is the reunification of the entire Korean Peninsula under the Kim family’s control, which would be impossible to pull off with US troops already deployed to South Korea and Washington formally committed to going to war on the South’s behalf.

So if Kim actually wants to try to reunify the two Koreas, he needs to somehow break up the US-South Korea alliance. If the US were no longer willing to defend Seoul, then South Korea — which has no nuclear weapons of its own — would be a lot easier to invade and defeat. But how do you break up that alliance? How do you convince the US not to come to South Korea’s defense in case of war?

Being able to credibly threaten to destroy New York or Washington definitely helps. Kim can now force American leaders to stop and think whether it’s really worth risking a possible nuclear attack on the US mainland just to defend South Korea from a North Korean attack. North Korea has missiles capable of reaching the West Coast and is thought to have nuclear warheads that would fit on top of them. They could destroy a major nuclear city. To modify a phrase from the Cold War, would Trump be prepared to trade San Francisco for Seoul?

If Kim decides the answer is no, using a nuclear weapon against South Korea no longer seems crazy or suicidal. It starts to seem rational. And one particular South Korean city starts to seem like the likeliest target.

“When our special forces run into the Chinese special forces, what do we do?”
In July 2016, Kim test-fired three missiles as part of what a North Korean state-run news agency described as mock “pre-emptive strikes at ports and airfields in the operational theater in South Korea, where the U.S. imperialists nuclear war hardware is to be hurled” in case of a future conflict between the two sides.

That was widely seen as an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons against the South Korean port city of Busan, which would play a vital role in any Pentagon effort to build a force big enough to defend the South or to lead a preemptive strike on the North.

The US currently has around 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea and would need to deploy hundreds of thousands more if war broke out with the North. The US would also have to send in thousands of additional tanks, armored personnel carriers, bombers, fighter jets, helicopters, and artillery pieces.

The problem is that the Pentagon’s cargo planes can only ferry in a few hundred troops or a couple of tanks at a time. That means the vast bulk of the US troops and equipment would need to come by boat, a laborious process that could take six weeks or longer to complete. The American ships would unload at Busan, and the best way for Kim to destroy those ports — and significantly slow US efforts to send in enough troops to make a difference in the fight — would be to nuke the city.

Jouas, the retired Air Force general, told me that North Korea’s thinking about whether to use a nuclear weapon early in a conflict has likely changed as the country has built more of the weapons and developed missiles and rockets capable of hitting more distant targets.

There is a genuine risk of a war on the Korean Peninsula.
“In the past, when North Korea had a limited number of nuclear weapons, the assessment was that they’d marshal them to use only as a last resort,” he told me. “Now that their inventory has grown, it’s easier to imagine them using some of the weapons at the onset of hostilities to try to shape the way the rest of the war would unfold.”

Bruce Klingner, a 20-year veteran of the CIA who spent years studying North Korea, told me that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had stood by in 2002 as the US methodically built up the forces it used to invade the country — and oust Hussein — the following year. He said there was little chance that Kim would follow in Hussein’s footsteps and patiently allow the Pentagon to deploy the troops and equipment it would need for a full-on war with North Korea.

“The conventional wisdom used to be that North Korea would use only nuclear weapons as part of a last gasp, twilight of the gods, pull the temple down upon themselves kind of move,” said Klingner, who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “But we have to prepare for the real possibility that Kim would use nuclear weapons in the early stages of a conflict, not the latter ones.”

We also have to prepare for the fact that if the US and North Korea do actually come to blows, China will get involved — and not in the ways that either Washington or Pyongyang might expect.

The China problem

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Oriana Skylar Mastro, a North Korea expert at Georgetown University, argues persuasively that the US fundamentally misunderstands China’s relationship with the Kim government. US officials have long believed that Beijing is committed to North Korea’s survival and might take steps to ensure that Kim’s regime doesn’t collapse and send millions of starving refugees flowing into China. That line of thinking, she writes, is “dangerously out of date.”

Mastro continues:

Today, China is no longer wedded to North Korea’s survival. In the event of a conflict or the regime’s collapse, Chinese forces would intervene to a degree not previously expected — not to protect Beijing’s supposed ally but to secure its own interests.

More specifically, she and several of the other experts I spoke to believe that China would quickly send hundreds of thousands of troops into North Korea to seize control of the country’s nuclear sites and prevent Kim from using the weapons. Chinese and North Korean troops wouldn’t be working together against a common enemy; they’d be trying to kill each other.

“China would have to fight its way into North Korea,” Mastro told me in an interview. “For the North Koreans, enemy No. 1 is obviously the United States, but enemy No. 2 is China. They understand they’d have to potentially fight both countries.”

Things would get really complicated, and really dangerous, once Chinese troops made their way to the nuclear facilities. The Pentagon has spent years practicing how to send US special operations forces into North Korea to seize Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons if there were signs that Kim’s government was collapsing. The problem is that Chinese troops would almost certainly be sent into North Korea at the same time, and with the same goal, as the US forces.

Mastro notes that Chinese troops would only need to advance 60 miles into North Korea to take control of all of the country’s highest-priority nuclear sites and two-thirds of its highest-priority missile sites. Given that enormous geographic advantage, Beijing’s troops would almost certainly arrive before the US ones do.
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“When our special forces run into the Chinese special forces, what do we do? Are we going to shoot at each other or shake hands?” Bennett told me. “That’s an incredibly risky decision to make on the fly.”

There’s no reason to think the countries would necessarily come to blows. The US could live with the North Korean nuclear weapons ending up in China’s hands, since Beijing already has a sizable nuclear arsenal and relatively stable relationships with both Washington and many of its neighbors in the region.

But Beijing would be intervening to protect its own interests, not those of the US. A war between North and South Korea would almost certainly end with the creation of a reunified country led by the pro-US government in Seoul; China would want to make sure it wasn’t left out in the cold.

In this, and this alone, a war with North Korea would bear some similarities to the war in Iraq. When the Bush administration ousted the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, it wasn’t prepared for what became a concerted and years-long Iranian push to ensure that Iraq’s political system was dominated by Shia political parties with close ties to Tehran. Iran has largely gotten its way: Several of Iraq’s postwar leaders have allowed Iranian militias to operate within the country, and Baghdad has noticeably chilly relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran’s other regional rivals.

All of which is to say that China, like Iran, would be trying to stabilize postwar Korea on its own terms, not those of the US. And it would be doing so against a Trump administration that is notably hostile and fearful of China’s rising global influence.
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Joe Wilson for Vox
Trump and Kim have the ability to start a nuclear war. Will they walk back from the brink?

So how scared should we be?

That, more than anything else, is the question that’s been on my mind for the weeks I’ve spent reporting this story. The good news is that the experts I spoke to don’t think war is inevitable, or even probable. Most, like Jung Pak, a former North Korea analyst for the CIA, believe that Kim is a rational leader who has been careful during his years in power to walk right up to the edge without going over it.

“People say he’s young and untested, but he’s not that young anymore and he’s not that untested anymore,” she said, noting that Kim has led his country since 2011 and has managed to massively expand his nuclear arsenal without triggering a war with the US or South Korea. “He’s a brutal dictator that is aggressive and vindictive and prone to violence, but he’s a rational leader making fundamentally rational choices. He knows how to dial things up, but he also knows how to recalibrate and dial them back down.”

Danush Parvaneh/Vox; AP Images
Pak and others note there have been some recent, fragile signs of diplomatic progress. North and South Korea just announced plans for their athletes to train together in advance of the Winter Olympics and enter the opening ceremonies as one team, under the flag of a reunified Korea. The North and South Korean governments are holding ongoing talks, and South Korea and the US agreed to postpone new military exercises until after the Olympics, a move widely seen as a goodwill gesture to North Korea. Trump is for the moment saying he’s committed to diplomacy and believes he would “probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.”

But here’s the bad news, and the reason hours of conversations with some of the people who know North Korea best have left me feeling profoundly unsettled: It’s easy to imagine a misunderstanding or accidental run-in between the two skittish countries leading to a full-blown war.

“I have queasy feeling that we’re in 1914 stumbling towards Sarajevo,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last September, a reference to the assassination of an Austrian archduke that triggered the devastation of World War I. “And what worries me is not an instantaneous nuclear confrontation, but an accidental escalation based upon the rhetoric that’s going back and forth.”

King continued:

That’s what worries me, is a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding, an event: a shooting down of a bomber, a strike on a ship that leads to a countermeasure, that leads to a countermeasure, and the end result is that if Kim Jong Un feels his regime is under attack, then the unthinkable happens.

He then asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, who was testifying at the session, if the US and North Korea had any direct lines of communication that could be used to defuse a tense situation before it spirals out of control.

“We do not,” Dunford replied.

And that’s the most dangerous aspect of the current standoff, and the issue that could most easily lead to a conflict whose potential human costs are so high — millions dead, millions more wounded, major cities lying in ruins — as to be almost unimaginable.

With no lines of communication, a simple mistake could ultimately lead to all-out war.
The US is led by a hotheaded president who lacks military experience, is prone to unpredictable flashes of rage and fury, talks openly of destroying another sovereign country, and has alarmed advisers with his ignorance about America’s massive number of nuclear weapons and seemingly blasé attitude toward their use. (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comment that Trump was a “fucking moron” came after the president told his top advisers that he wanted a tenfold increase in the size of the US nuclear arsenal.)

North Korea is led by Kim, a man who rarely leaves his own country, has executed scores of relatives and high-ranking officials, literally starves his own people to free up money for his country’s nuclear program, and regularly uses apocalyptic language to describe what he sees as a coming war with the US and South Korea.

Maybe next week Kim will test-fire a missile that flies too close to Guam or Hawaii and Trump will decide enough is enough. Or maybe a US ship will accidentally drift into North Korean waters and Kim’s navy will open fire. With no lines of communication, a simple mistake could set off a cascading series of responses that ultimately lead to all-out war. In a situation this combustible, there are an enormous number of moves — some intentional, some accidental — that could light the match.
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https://www.vox.com/world/2018/2/7/1697 ... ear-weapon
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Feb 08, 2018 5:41 pm

$1.2 trillion over several years to improve and modernize our nuclear weapons.
$886 billion this year, for Defense, a bit more than what we've budgeted for each of the last 9 years.
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But I'll be damned - not one single penny budgeted for peace, ever!

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2018USbf_19bs2n_507030#usgs302
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Re: Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 08, 2018 5:43 pm

I think that price includes a nuke app for trump's phone :)
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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