The Reason I Can Never Enjoy a Good Night’s Sleep Until He’s Removed From Office
by tristero
President Donald Trump’s acting national security adviser, former Reagan administration official Charles Kupperman, made an extraordinary and controversial claim in the early 1980s: nuclear conflict with the USSR was winnable and that “nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem.”
Kupperman’s suggestion that the U.S. could triumph in a nuclear war went against dominant theories of mutually assured destruction and ignored the long-term destabilizing effects that such hostilities would have on the planet’s health and global politics.
Kupperman, appointed to his new post on Tuesday after Trump fired his John Bolton from the job, argued it was possible to win a nuclear war “in the classical sense,” and that the notion of total destruction stemming from such a superpower conflict was inaccurate. He said that in a scenario in which 20 million people died in the U.S. as opposed to 150 million, the nation could then emerge as the stronger side and prevail in its objectives.
His argument was that with enough planning and civil defense measures, such as “a certain layer of dirt and some reinforced construction materials,” the effects of a nuclear war could be limited and that U.S. would be able to fairly quickly rebuild itself after an all-out conflict with the then-Soviet Union.
“It may take 15 years, but geez, look how long it took Europe to recover after the Second World War,” Kupperman said. Referring to the Japanese city on which the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb in 1945, he also claimed that “Hiroshima, after it was bombed, was back and operating three days later.”
It is genuinely difficult for me to read things like this without hyperventilating. This is sheer madness. That someone this nuts should be so close to the nuclear chain of command… frankly, it’s only a matter of time.
And of course, Kupperman’s views are congruent with his boss’s:
Donald Trump asked a foreign policy expert advising him why the U.S. can’t use nuclear weapons, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on the air Wednesday, citing an unnamed source who claimed he had spoken with the GOP presidential nominee.
“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said on his “Morning Joe” program.
We are living in the single most dangerous moment in all of human history, far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis or the other terrifying nuclear crises. During those horrific moments, the president of the United States and his advisers were, for the most part, rational actors who fully grasped what nuclear bombs were. Trump and his advisers cannot be trusted to act rationally in a crisis.
And that’s the main reason why Trump has to be removed. And until he is, only the delusional or the clueless can sleep well. The situation is profoundly dangerous.
PS For those arguing that there are enough checks and balances to forestall a dangerously disturbed official like Trump or Kupperman from initiating a nuclear strike, please read Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine.
Goodnight.