Trump’s Stolen Nuclear Documents: The Foundation for a “Nero Decree”?
OK, in our darkest imaginings, we thought that this *might* be how unhinged, petty, vengeful & evil Trump was.
One of the basic documents about America’s nuclear arsenal is actually really, really out of date. As in, it relies on technology from 1975, that was secure back then …
… but now?
The first design principal to consider is called strong link/weak link, built into new nukes since 1975.
“Critical elements of the detonator system are deliberately ‘weak’ in that they will irreversibly fail if exposed to certain kinds of abnormal environments,” writes Columbia University’s Steven Bellovin, a cybersecurity professor at Columbia University who has collected reams of open source material on nuclear weapon protections. “A commonly-used example is a capacitor whose components will melt at reasonably low temperatures.”
An example of a “strong link” that protects the bomb is the detonation system, which is electrically separated from the rest of the bomb so that its won’t be fried by bursts of energy (like other exploding bombs or jamming.) “The strong link provides electrical isolation of the detonation system,” Bellovin writes. “It only responds to very particular inputs.”
The upshot for potential nuke thieves is that it’s hard to set off a nuclear bomb under any condition except the specific one baked into its design.
Hard. But not impossible. Certainly not if you have the documents that allow you to backwards-engineer the failsafes in the system and bypass those controls.
Which brings us to the deranged, lunatic mindset of Trump.
Hitler infamously had the “Nero Decree” in which he ordered his fanatical followers to destroy every single thing in Germany as vengeance against the German people for “betraying” him by failing to worship him enough & win an impossible war.
What would Trump do if he were actually arrested? What orders would he pass on to, say, Roger Stone, to pass on to Trump fanatics inside the Strategic Air Command or Department of Energy?
Dunno about you guys, but I’m not sleeping very well these days.