Between Donald Trumps words and his actions falls the nuclear shadow.
You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over.
And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and theyre building nuclear weapons.
Castle Bravo, the first high-yield thermonuclear weapon U.S. design test at at Bikini Atoll.© Pentagon photo.
Hes not wrong, but listening to him say it made blood ooze from my ears.
Theres a strong argument that no single person has made the world more dangerous regarding nuclear weapons than Trump.
Total global nukes peaked in 1986 at around 60,000 weapons.
Most of those belonged to the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Then a long line of world leaders, starting with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev started to draw down.
Experts estimate that there are now around12,100 nukes.
Just like in 1986, most of those weapons are in Russia and America.
And the drawdown trend is reversing.
China, which has sat on around 300 nukes for decades, is building more.
Russia is constructing new and different kinds of nuclear weapons.
Trump didnt start these trends, but he did supercharge them.
President Obama negotiated a deal with Iran to keep the country from developing nuclear weapons.
America would, in exchange, reduce sanctions and live weapons embargos after a few years.
When Trump became president he pulled out of the deal.
Israel, emboldened by recent military victories, isconsidering a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Trump turned diplomacy into violence.
Not content, Trump then unilaterally pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
It covered both nuclear and conventional warheads.
Trump said he was pulling out because Russia was breaking the rules.
Now no one is abiding by the treaty.Its dead.
Then Trumpwithdrew the U.S. from the Open Skies Treaty.
It was trust but verify encoded into a pact between nations.
Again the risk of nuclear war ratched up.
Similar to the INF, it put a limit on deployed strategic nuclear warheads.
It will expire next year unless both sides agree to renew it, but its effectively dead.
Russiasuspended its participationin the treaty in 2023.
Trump, as was typical of him at the time, spent his first presidencytrashing it.
He called it a bad deal and said it wasnt good unless China was part of it.
Nuclear weapons are world-ending weapons.
Limiting their use and reducing their number requires delicate and extraordinary trust between rival countries.
The treaties werent just verbal agreements, but complex documents that created monitoring regimes.
It was an invocation between opponents to confirm everyone was playing fair.
China has around 500.
A nuclear-armed country has invaded Europe.
No one is watching the nuclear till.
Russia and the U.S. are no longer inspecting each other.
It doesnt matter what Trump says, off the cuff, while sitting behind the Resolute Desk.
It matters what he does.
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