'Will an impulsive and aggressive Trump get us all killed by launching a nuclear war?"
Title: "Donald Trump Wants to Make It Easier to Start a Nuclear War. This Should Petrify Us."
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/08/donald-trump-nuclear-war/Extract: "Last Friday, while cable news channels rolled on the Nunes memo, the Pentagon published the latest Nuclear Posture Review, or NPR, which includes two pretty alarming new components.
First, while Barack Obama’s 2010 NPR for the first time ruled out a nuclear attack against non-nuclear weapon states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, Trump’s NPR goes in the opposite direction and suggests that the U.S. could employ nuclear weapons in “extreme circumstances” to defend the “vital interests” of the United States and its allies.
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Second, the new NPR calls for the development of a new generation of so-called low-yield nuclear weapons. These smaller nukes, the document suggests, would be tactical, not strategic; deployed to the battlefield, rather than dropped on a city. The problem with this argument is that the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima (200,000 dead) and Nagasaki (70,000 dead) could also be considered low-yield nuclear weapons, in terms of their explosive capacity.
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To quote Bruce Blair, a former nuclear missile launch officer and research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University: “We all need to confront the fact that [the U.S. political system] gives one person the God-like power to end the world.”
The questions, therefore, that matter far more than any other in 2018: Does the narcissist-in-chief plan on using this “God-like power?” Will an impulsive and aggressive Trump get us all killed by launching a nuclear war? Everything else is noise."
