Trump just plopped this one out.
The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016
The world will have come to its senses when we get rid of nukes, and when we get rid of sabre-rattling assholes like Donald Fucking Trump. You don’t diminish the threat of nuclear war by strengthening and expanding your nuclear arsenal.
Also, this seems appropriate now.
Is there another scandal Trump is trying to distract from? He always gets more outrageous when a journalist starts to shake the tree.
He’s right. We can only destroy the world ten times over, at least twelve times is necessary.
I never thought I’d live to see the day I’d see Jojo on Pharyngula.
We must have posted about this at the same time. I’m beginning to question what I see with my own eyes. Donny came out with this right after Putin made noise about increasing strengthening Russia’s nuclear weapons to be able to penetrate missile shields.
Everyone having fun yet?
Just another aspect of the “good old days” when you could lynch uppities, beat your wife, rape your secretary, buy a home, car, and anything else you wanted on a single income…
And live in constant fear of nuclear annihilation. Whee.
Putin made noise about increasing strengthening Russia’s nuclear weapons to be able to penetrate missile shields.
Putin is (rightly) still operating under the MAD concept from the cold war; it’ll work for the new cold war that the US is starting, too. If the US has an impenetrable missile shield, some idiot in Washington will be constantly whispering “we can take them…”*
Coming next: bomber gap 2.0 and missile gap 2.0.
(* ignoring the cost of millions of lives, natch)
Putin is probably smart enough to know that Trump isn’t going to last forever, so best break the disarmament treaties when he’s got his stooge and then be able to negotiate from a higher baseline next time around.
A nuclear-weapons jobs program initiated by Trump – can’t imagine what could go wrong.
numerobis:
Putin is smart enough to know what an ignorant incompetent Trump is, and how easy it is to manipulate him, all reasons why Putin wanted Trump in the white house.
numerobis@#7:
Putin is probably smart enough to know that Trump isn’t going to last forever, so best break the disarmament treaties
You do know that the US unilaterally exited the 1971 ABM test ban treaty in june 2002, right?
That’s just a data-point.
The Obama administration’s “nuclear refresh” (actually the push for that has been going on for some time) will entail the US cheating on or exiting any test ban treaties, because they’re going to have to try out the new toys to make sure they work. Everyone knows that. It also means the US is going to officially cheat on any warhead reductions it negotiated, because you don’t “upgrade” a nuclear weapon: you build another one and then eventually break down the older one.
SC@#8:
A nuclear-weapons jobs program initiated by Trump – can’t imagine what could go wrong
If the world was lucky, it’d be a gigantic waste of money and end with a few potemkin warheads. Kind of like Trump Air, Trump champagne, the Trump Taj Mahal, etc. All fluff and no substance is not a bad thing when you’re talking about fusion weapons.
If you “superpowers” nuke each other anytime soon, please try to avoid hitting the rest of the world directly, okay? There’ll be more than enough indirect damage to deal with.
Ah, but the new warheads will need new delivery systems, generating jobs.
Or something.
Maybe Trump will want to make some money as well, perhaps, selling Russia its plutonium back.
He so wants to keep his plans so secret that he even keeps his plans from himself. He just keeps following his instructions to tweet out incomprehensible garble to keep everyone talking about so his underlings can do the work of stealing everything from everyone by convincing them they are buying something and not just vaporware.
—
armchair diagnostician: Trump is suffering clinical delusion. HE asserts something one day the next day asks, sincerely, “who said that?”. Appears to think he’s playing a character in a stage play of improv. where he can just say first impulse, and being improv, the rest will just play along. Treats foreign policy like a grand board game with plastic pieces that can just be shoved around the board [you the game to which I’m alluding]. Whenever asked any follow-up questions for him to support his assertions, his first response is usually, “I know I’m correct [full stop]”.
*ugh* the list of incidents of mind boggling behaviors is quite extensive, not just a sparse list. To avoid running this derail too far into the woods, I’ll just leave it as:
We installed a person suffering from clinical delusion, as president elect. We need to “prepare for an intense struggle ahead”.
[] ? []
move along, nothing to see here
Remember, Obama still has almost a month left to order all currently existing nukes be launched into the sun (or whatever method of destroying them he can spin as an “attack”).
Since I’m living outside the US now I gotta ask: Is it more dangerous to live in America as a US citizen or outside it?
I don’t think I’ll be returning home anytime soon.
re 16:
the answer to your question:
barring an actual exchange accidentally or deliberate of atomic weapons they have the smell of something like the Maginot Line. A defense based on the last war which was probably only effective until 1960 when the realization that the use such weapons could only lead to “M.A.D.” and were of no use in the events that have characterized things since then. In fact it is becoming clear that it is easier to manipulate the politics and economies to gain advantage without resorting to even threatening to use such weapons. As in this case to encourage us to spend all of our existing credit on crap we can not use and can’t afford until we reach the point of both economic collapse and political chaos.
uncle frogy
As others have said, YES. I myself carry a USAlien pisspot but live in France — which will probably also go nazi in around six months time — and do not see any not-too-dangerous alternatives.
@ 9 Caine
Putin is smart enough to know what an ignorant incompetent Trump is, and how easy it is to manipulate him, all reasons why Putin wanted Trump in the white house
More to the point, Putin is smart enough and has the analysts, as well, to know that The Donald is a raving narcissist and is so erratic that one cannot count on manipulating him at all. One cannot reliably manipulate someone who has no consistent thought or behaviour patterns and that is Trump.
Oh sure, the Russians might get Trump to do one thing they want but, having an attention span of a gnat, Trump will just move on to the next sycophant who needs something.
The thought that Putin wanted Trump in the White House is ludicrous, though considering the warmongering alternative, he may have considered it a fifty–fifty situation. No good choice and not even the choice of the lesser of the two evils.
@15
Still relevant: http://www.the-postillon.com/2016/11/nuclear-codes-lost.html
I honestly thought this moron was going to keep the body-count down to a few thousand, perhaps hundreds of thousands. I hadn’t imagined millions.
slithy tove@#14:
armchair diagnostician: Trump is suffering clinical delusion.
Way to throw all the sufferers of delusion-inducing mental illness under the bus, just to score an insignificant point off Trump.
Can’t you just be satisfied that Trump appears to suffer from “lying asshole syndrome”? That way, you’re scoring splash damage on other lying assholes, but it’s – you know, true.
If Trump’s psychiatrist were to clinically diagnose Trump as being delusional (having some actual disorder) then we’d be looking at president Pence, anyway. So, … lose/lose.
spend all of our existing credit on crap we can not use and can’t afford until we reach the point of both economic collapse and political chaos
Hey, it defeated the USSR! So, uh, clearly it works!
Wait! It all makes sense now! Trump will put the coal miners back to work–but not for the coal, just to dig mine shafts! For the Important People (like him and his family) to wait out the nuclear holocaust! After all, the Russkies have lots of mines, and we must NOT HAVE a MINE SHAFT GAP!
(Music up: “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn…..)
re @24:
yes, I agree.
I tried to announce I was being an asshole by prefacing that with “armchair diagnostician”.
I knew it was insulting those who actually possess such maladies, I was just trying to vent my rage at Trump’s gibberish.
Simply possessing “lying asshole syndrome” seemed insufficient to include all his incoherence.
I truly apologize for splash damage.
I was imagining Trump reading everything any of us write about him, and simply wanted to piss him off.
Sorry I overlooked splash damage effects. I know he doesn’t see any of this, why would he.
I suck. shit. dammit. expletive slap
@#10, Marcus Ranum:
Hush, don’t you know that the Russians are responsible for everything bad right now? They’re responsible for Clinton’s loss, because, um, er, a bunch of e-mails leaked and we found out how arrogant and stupid the DNC was, and even though you will be very hard-pressed to find anyone at all who will say they were seriously influenced by a leak which only revealed what even most Democratic voters were admitting was true, that was the reason they lost. The FBI and the CIA confirm this via announcements which include no proof and are conveniently anonymous, so you can totally ignore the statement from Wikileaks that it was a disgruntled DNC staffer who leaked the documents. Because the FBI and the CIA are totally trustworthy and never ever tell politically expedient lies or try to gin up conflict. Except when they talk about Clinton’s e-mail server, or advise George W. Bush, or… well, okay, they tell lies all the time, but not when they denounce the Russians, and we know this must be true because the DNC says it is. They know the Russians are out to get them; why, every time one of them stubs a toe, it’s a Russian plot. (It can’t possibly be because they’re incompetent, the fault must lie with someone else, and now that they’ve decided not to blame sexists, racists, the media, men, white women, unions, Sanders supporters, or black people — all of whom had their moment in the sun as the one and only reason why they lost the election, according to the DNC — it must be the Russians. Putin in particular, but the Russians as a whole, every one of them. The Russians have it coming. Why, they dared to oppose the neocon will in Syria, and for that alone they must die!)
馬鹿
ビデオは面白いよ。
That manga video was very interesting.
あのマンガビデオは面白かたです。
StarDrake @26:
Trump is the founder of Vault-Tec? Suddenly, many things make sense.
On another appendage, The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) is still 馬鹿。
The Vicar, you apparently don’t realise that Marcus @10 refers to the claim that a major reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse was its attempt to keep up with Reagan’s massive increase in “defense” spending during the 1980s sent it broke.
Putin is certainly smarter than Trump – but that’s like saying he’s healthier than Elvis. I think it quite likely that Putin did want Trump to win and do his best to help him (although the “Putin is to blame” stuff is considerably over-egged – how could Putin have put Trump in the White House if American political and media culture were not deeply pathological?) – but if he did, that’s evidence Putin really isn’t smart at all.
KG, Russia is essentially a petroleum-economy. Trump is a global-warming denier.
( https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd#.pxa8yyxkr )
Personally, I’m glad that Putin is at least a smart megalomaniac. Imagine two guys of Trump’s temper ruling the two most powerful militaries on planet earth.
“Trump is a global-warming denier.”
I think he knows global warming is real. He just doesn’t give a shit.
Also, is that an anime about PZ Myers?
I do not know for sure what trump knows or does not know or if he thinks about anything but what is clear from the campaign and his business practices is that he will say just about anything to make the sale or impress who is listening.
he does not appear to be so good on real follow through however.
if Putin thinks he will deliver something I suspect he has also been had.
The only thing he is good at is looking good while selling BS and still walking off with the money.
his crew on the other hand is something to be afraid of.
uncle frogy
Trump’s anti-global-warming plan: nuclear winter.
I watched Rachel Maddow last night and she interviewed the deplorable Kellyanne Conway. First up on the discussion was Trump’s nuclear tweet. According to Conway, Trump didn’t mean what he said in the tweet. He actually meant something entirely different.
If “comes to its senses” means reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons, isn’t Trump admitting he has lost his senses?
Trump’s latest tweet on the subject: let it be an arms race.
And I probably don’t need to remind everyone here that a year ago, this same person didn’t even know what the Nuclear Triad was.
microraptor @41, Yes, Trump certainly did not agree with the unconvincing softening that Kellyanne Conway attempted on Maddow’s show (comment 39). Trump just wants to keep the country “safe and secure.” Not buying it.
Maddow Link
So Trump told Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, “Let there be an arms race!” We have elected a man who is going to get us all killed. Talking Points Memo link.
Video available at the link.
Whoops. In comment 42, I included the wrong link for the Talking Points Memo article. Here is the correct link:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-brzezinski-nuclear-let-it-be-an-arms-race
Sean Spicer, Trump’s pick for the White House press secretary position, also tried to clarify Trump’s terrifying statements about nuclear weapons. Spicer said that Trump was responding to other countries talking about expanding their own nuclear capabilities.
“It was in response to a lot of countries. Russia, China and others are talking about expanding their nuclear capability,” Spicer said on Fox News.
“We’re not going to sit back and watch other nations threaten our safety,” Spicer said on NBC’s “Today.”
Still not clear. We still don’t know what Trump is proposing nor what he will do.
I would just like to point out that Trump cannot use his expanded nuclear arsenal to fight ISIS.
Talk about a reversal of bipartisan policy! As David Corn put it:
From Think Progress:
I totally agree. I think the first country that should come to its senses regarding nukes is the USA.
Given the fact that the US has just elected Donald Trump to the White House, the UK has cut off its nose to spite its face with Brexit, Putin is making a hobby of hideously dangerous Cold War style nuclear posturing of his own, China is engaging in perilous brinkmanship in the South China Sea, and France seems set to elect another hard Right numpty to a position of global power in the next few months, the idea that collectively humanity is even capable of ‘coming to its senses’ with regard to anything seems to be right up there amongst the most ridiculous things teh Trum-prat has ever uttered. Which is really saying something.
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jrkrideau @21;
I don’t think Putin engineered Trump’s election win as some claim, but I can see a reason why Putin might be very pleased that Trump has won that doesn’t involve manipulating Trump personally at all. As you say, Trump is an erratic and inconsistent figure who can’t even maintain a consistent policy on anything, but there is still one thing such a leader can be relied upon to deliver – chaos. Putin is making a move to try to reassert Russian power and influence on the global stage, and every time Trump’s idiocy and general flailing antics upset the proverbial apple cart in the US and within the broader Western alliance, that provides Putin with yet more opportunity to pursue his goals without anything in the way of effective or even vaguely coordinated opposition from the US and by extension from the NATO powers as a bloc. Trump’s incompetency in office, and inevitable failure of anything approaching leadership, may be sufficient in and of itself for Putin’s purposes. While more serendipitous windfall that planned fruits of conspiracy, I imagine Putin is quite content with the outcome thus far. Whether he will stay that way when he realizes just how out of touch with reality Trump truly is, and consequently how impossible it will be to have any kind of working relationship with Trump or his administration at all, remains to be seen. Frankly, I don’t think Putin is long headed enough to have considered what a problem that might be yet. He probably still thinks Trump will settle down once he is sworn into office.
@#31, chigau (ever-elliptical):
Not even in the slightest degree. I am, however, somewhat 時代遅れ in still thinking the official line was that it was all Russia’s fault; the latest excuse for the failure of the Democrats, as suggested in a trial balloon via Joe Biden, is that Hillary Clinton didn’t really want to be President anyway, her campaign was a sacrifice of her own desires on behalf of all women everywhere, and that’s why she didn’t run a good campaign, her heart wasn’t in it. This appears to be — aside from an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying any attention whatsoever to the Democratic Party over the last 20 years or so — an attempt to absolve the DNC of its obvious guilt for the whole sorry mess (see Harry Reid’s recent comments about how 役に立たない the national party has become) by trying to convince everyone that all the problems were Clinton’s fault — who, conveniently, is probably going to retire and spend her days counting her millions, and is totally expendable. This will leave the DNC free to screw up 2018 and interfere with the 2020 primaries without having to admit any sort of wrongdoing. (Maybe they’ll run Rahm Emmanuel then — he may not be a woman, but he’s technically a minority, and therefore by DNC thinking every minority voter will automatically turn out for him no matter how horrible he may be, he’s best buddies with the banks and brokerages — which is the main issue that matters to them — and he’s spending his time as mayor of Chicago trying to simultaneously suggest to voters that he disapproves of things like the Homan Square black site while doing nothing substantial to put an end to them, which is very much the tactic the DNC wants in its candidates.) (And let’s not kid ourselves: if they pick him in 2019, any opponents he may have in the 2020 primaries will be sabotaged, and people like you will vote for him because otherwise the wrong lizard might get in. And you’ll tell yourself it’s wiser to vote for a sociopathic thug than to jump ship to a third party because lesser-of-two-evils-supreme-court, the same way you do every four years.)
@#32, John Morales
Maybe his post at #11 was, possibly, but his post at #10 appears to mostly be pointing out that we’re already doing the nasty evil things “we” (meaning Democratic tribalists) are worried about Russia doing, sort of the way “we” are horribly offended by the idea of Russians hacking U.S. government computers even though we had Stuxnet about 7 years ago. But it is for the person themselves to clarify.
@#37, unclefrogy
It looks more and more like Trump isn’t just telling lies, but that he genuinely has lapses in memory and judgement (but not consciousness). He doesn’t appear to even be able to hold the same policy position on the same subject when talking to the same audience — I can certainly believe that he says whatever his current audience wants to hear, or whatever he thinks his current audience wants to hear, and I can believe that he would tell a different lie depending on what is convenient that day, but I have a hard time believing that he is on the fence about what his supporters believe about so many topics that he would tell them one thing and then something substantially different shortly thereafter, which he has done a few times now.
Who knows, maybe when he decides to fire off a nuke, the bits of his brain which control his memory will be temporarily shorted out, and won’t come back online until after he flip-flops back away from the idea, so he won’t be able to remember the launch codes.
Could be good, could be bad — keep in mind, though, that most of his cabinet are very rich people who want to continue getting richer and love most of the status quo. Whatever else you can say about them that is horrifying — and there’s a lot of that — the more he delegates to his cabinet, the less likely it is that we’ll start throwing nukes around like dodgeballs, because the end of the world is bad for business if it happens too fast.
I suspect that if Putin has had any actual role in the election — and we’re seeing a heck of a lot of bloviating about it, universally coming from people who either need a scapegoat or an enemy, and not even a grain of evidence so far — then it was probably less “Trump will be good for Russia” than “Clinton is a bellicose figure who has a history of supporting the disastrous destruction of sovereign nations for short-term policy goals, and she’s currently saber-rattling at us, so we’d better support her opponent”. Democrats basically ignored Clinton’s belligerence and her foreign policy record, but it’s there, and I doubt Putin missed it.
At the moment, it looks more like Putin is hoping he can sell Trump on the idea of some kind nonproliferation, or at least lessened saber-rattling — Trump’s initial Tweet which came out of nowhere was prompted, it seems, by Putin sending a letter asking for cooperation, which certainly reads like an attempt to feel out the ground and maybe ease some tensions. (And, of course, look for advantages, but it’s crazy not to think that all national leaders aren’t constantly doing that. If Putin wants to cooperate while looking for advantages for Russia, we should be trying to take advantage of the cooperation rather than denying it in a fit of pique because the offer comes from Putin.)
And for that matter, I would be happy if, 4 years from now, Trump was running for reelection on an accurate platform of “hey, look, I got us into a new nuclear disarmament deal after we pulled out of the old one under Bush, got us cooperating with our former enemies on terrorism, and now we’re safer than ever and spending less money on nuclear weapons to boot”. I still wouldn’t vote for him — that’s not enough to offset the other things he wants to do — but I’d be happy he did that.
sez the vicar @48: “It looks more and more like Trump isn’t just telling lies, but that he genuinely has lapses in memory and judgement (but not consciousness).”
Naah, the more parsimonious theory is that the Angry Cheeto is an extreme bullshitter. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about whether his statements are ‘true’ or ‘false’; rather, he cares about what his statements will persuade people to do for him. And, bluntly speaking, the people who voted the Cheeto into office don’t seem to give a flying fuck about whether the Cheeto’s statements are true or false, either… because if those people did give a flying fuck about that, they wouldn’t have voted for him.
The Vicar,
Um. I made an embarrassing error, and actually referred to his #25 when addressing you.
Sorry.
except it isn’t anyone’s official line, and you’re straw-manning and making shit up. again.
god I fucking hate you.
useless git.
@#51, Ichthyic
Right, right, and all the announcements from the Clinton campaign about Russians, and the announcement in Obama’s interview on NPR the other week that we were going to “respond to Russian cyperattacks”, and the stories in the media with the anonymous FBI and CIA stuff, all of that was totally not the official Democratic line. Right. I’m not sure whether you’ve shifted the goalposts so that neither the Clinton campaign nor Obama nor the DNC represent the party, or whether you’re just so invested in ignoring how horrifyingly bad the party is that you simply can’t believe anything bad about them, but either way, you’re being kind of a fool.
I suppose that when you’re so stupid that you’ll vote for whatever the Democratic Party pukes up as a candidate, no matter how utterly antithetical it may be to your principles, then it’s totally okay to put your fingers in your ears and yell “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”, and hate the people who point out what’s actually happening.
Well, lookie here, Cheeto Jesus promises a new arms race with Russia.
Phew, aren’t you glad you didn’t vote for that warmongering uber-hawk Clinton, eh Vicar?