Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif threatened nuclear retaliation against Israel after apparently being tricked by a story on a fake news site.
In the coming Age of Anxiety, we are going to have to pin a lot of hopes to those world leaders who are actually adults with a faculty for critical thought, and who aren’t twitter addicts. That certainly leaves the States out, but there are plenty of other contenders for Twit leaders as well.
Now it seems that another fake news story has prompted the defense minister of Pakistan to threaten to go nuclear.
The defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a saber-rattling Twitter post directed at Israel on Friday after a false report — which the minister apparently believed — that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons. Both countries have nuclear arsenals.
“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh,” the minister wrote on his official Twitter account, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.”
Yes, fake news is a serious problem. That said, is it really too much to expect those who are in a position of power and leadership to be calm and at least take out 10 to 20 seconds to verify a story? At the very least, yell at a staffer to check a story out before becoming utterly unglued and saying something stupid on Twitter.
“Our nuclear program is too serious a business to be left to Twitter-addicted politicians”, said prominent TV journalist Nusrat Javeed.
I agree, fully. Unfortunately, the U.S. will shortly have a new king president who is not only a twitter addict, he’s an extreme narcissist with the brain of a gnat. Not at all nerve-wracking.
All the science fiction stories about AI becoming sentient, or evil plots by shadowy international organizations were wrong. Nuclear apocalypse will be brought about by some dude-bro who got LOLs and $20 of ad dollars for bringing about the end of civilization.
Politicians: the last people on earth who should have control of nuclear weapons.
We shouldn’t have nuclear weapons at all. That said, I’m starting to think being a Twitter junkie should be an automatic ouster -- if you can’t control yourself on Twitter, no politics for you!