THREAD I see the my colleague, @MaxBoot, made a number of historical errors in his column on Trump's new nuclear plans. I'd like to help by correcting them. (And this has nothing to do with the shot he takes at me in his column.)
Nuclear disarmament isn’t “trendy” or “recent.” It began with Truman who made sure the very first resolution at the UN was on banning the bomb. huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione…
JFK said “We must abolish nuclear weapons or they will abolish us. Ronald Reagan said “We seek the total elimination on day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.” Trendy? Utopian? No, realists.
No one advocates unilateral US disarmament. We say the US must lead global efforts to reduce these immoral weapons, not lead the world in building more of them. I trace the successful history of Republicans and Democrats doing exactly this in "Bomb Scare" amazon.com/Bomb-Scare-His…
The real utopians are those like Boot who believe that we can keep 15,000 hydrogen bombs in fallible human hands indefinitely & nothing terrible will happen. We nuclear realists understand human nature & what a mistake it is to arm warring states with weapons of mass destruction.
It is true that Putin is brandishing his nuclear weapons — and so is the US. The title “Fire and Fury” comes from Trump’s threat to use nuclear weapons on North Korea. Both leaders issues insane threats.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/…
Boot’s embrace of “smaller” nuclear weapons is charmingly naive. He buys into the Orwellian logic of the new nuclear plan that we can raise the nuclear threshold by lowering the nuclear threshold.
You cannot blast Trump every day and then ignore that he has the sole, unchecked authority to destroy within minutes all that humankind has created over the millennia. Trump exposes our dangerous nuclear command structure AND poses unique nuclear risks.
Fortunately, senior members of Congress are worried. @tedlieu is urging new hearings to change our obsolete, Cold War policies: lieu.house.gov/media-center/p…
And, finally, I am sorry, Max, but the new review does try to terrorize Americancs into supporting new, expensive, dangerous, unnecessary weapons and policies at the cost of $1.7 Trillion and a possible nuclear war. Yes, it is Nuclear Nuts: defenseone.com/ideas/2018/02/…
