Friday, February 24, 2017

Nothing like the truth to define what a bad deal really is.

France, China, UK, Pakistan, India and Israel have a total of 1105 deployed nukes. The USA has 1740 deployed nukes, so that leave 635 deployed nukes for hitting Russia under Trump's "new enemy identification system."

Then North Korea has a maximum of 20 nukes. So that brings the deployed US nukes to 615 for Russia. I can see where Trump is coming from, especially when the USA is teetering on isolationism without alliances. He could have a point.

So, considering the US is gathering more enemies than allies, since 2003 and the invasion into Iraq, we might need to add 1335 deployed nukes to match Russia's capacity. Makes sense to me. I mean why take a chance France joins Russia. That's a fools game.

February 23, 2017
By Phillip Bump

...At the end of last year, (click here) after he won the election but before he was inaugurated, President-elect Donald Trump decided to proactively set U.S. nuclear policy via Twitter.

“The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” he tweeted Dec. 22. It was an out-of-the-blue declaration that made sense only as a response to a comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had made earlier in the day, in which Putin suggested that his country planned to strengthen its own strategic nuclear arsenal.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Trump revisited the issue, declaring that the United States has “fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity.” He placed some of the blame for this on the 2010 New START agreement, a successor to the 1991 START agreement that was signed by President Barack Obama and aimed at further reducing the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States. New START, Trump said, was “another bad deal that the country made.”

“I am the first one that would like to see nobody have nukes,” he said, “but we’re never going to fall behind any country even if it’s a friendly country. We’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power.”

“If countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack,” he added....