In this period of heightened danger of nuclear annihilation, we can all use Tom Lehrer's optimistic take on this final scenario.
Making Nuclear Weapons Usable Again
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The Senate holds a hearing to debate President Trump's power to use nuclear weapons without congressional approval.
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Focusing mainly on Trump's first year in office, the authors emphasize what they call a pattern of systematic reaction, where growing voter frustration regularly drives each party in and out of control. Trump arrived with scant political capital, amassed little and appears to have no strategic competence going forward. While the authors believe Trump can develop one, the essayist faults the authors for offering nothing but wishfulness to back up the assumption.
It’s in our interest to negotiate, to ratchet down tensions that could lead to an accidental nuclear or conventional war
The militarized Trump White House is pursuing plans for a trillion-dollar rebuild of the entire US nuclear weapons complex.
The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.
Most nonproliferation experts — as well as former President Jimmy Carter and a number of former Pentagon and State Department officials, both Republican and Democrat — agree that the brutal and murderous Kim, for all his bluster, is not irrational or suicidal, but bent on preserving his regime and preventing a U.S. attack. Nuclear weapons are a defensive, not an offensive, tool for the North Korean leadership.
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