re: #24 Backwoods_Sleuth

Context:

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

During the summer, Trump asked 3 times in an hour briefing, “Why Can’t We Use Nuclear Weapons?’” https://t.co/r6zpmvNLWg https://t.co/ABVlWey2lt

— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) December 22, 2016

Trump thinks that using nukes is okay. He thinks proliferation is a good thing. He doesn’t get that proliferation is tremendously destabilizing, and increases the chances nukes get used - or fall into the wrong hands.

Trump’s grasp of history and reality is seriously flawed.

He has no one who can tell him just how close we came to nuking our own country during the height of the Cold War - including one where we could have nuked Savannah/Charleston being one of the more infamous situations, but there were similar ones over Spain, to say nothing of various issues at nuclear weapons facilities across the country too. And our record of accident pales in comparison to the Soviets/Russians who had some massive accidents and broken arrows of their own - and made sure to hide all of it from their citizens - a situation that continued right up through the Chernobyl accident at a civilian reactor.

Proliferation could make already unstable situations even worse - imagine Saudis and Iranians both with functioning nuclear weapons and regimes that could potentially use it on each other (or worse, giving it to proxies for use) - irradiating large swaths of the Middle East and disrupting energy supplies for billions of people in the process.