Tag: nuclear

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North Korea Now Has Missile-Ready Nuclear Weapons, Trump Threatens “Fire & Fury”

(image via Flickr)

According to the Washington Post, North Korea now has missile-ready nuclear weapons.

This is very, very bad.

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.

UPDATE – Trump just issued this statement promising “fire and fury” should North Korea make any more threats to the United States.

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with the fire and fury like the world has never seen.

 “He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with the fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.

 “Thank you.”

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Pentagon Prepares As North Korea Threatens Possible Nuclear Test

The above tweet from President Trump four years ago seems practically precognitive.

Of course, President Babyhands was talking about Obama at the time, but his past tweets have become his own prologue.

As word comes that North Korea could launch yet another nuclear test this weekend, the U.S. has moved several major military assets into the region.

NBC News reports:

The intelligence officials told NBC News that the U.S. has positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region, one just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site.

American heavy bombers are also positioned in Guam to attack North Korea should it be necessary, and earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group was being diverted to the area.

According to reports, the U.S. could launch a preemptive strike if intelligence and military leaders believe the unpredictable North Korea might attempt the nuclear test.

How North Korea might respond is anyone’s guess.

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Trump On Nuclear Proliferation: “Let It Be An Arms Race”

President-elect Donald Trump

The world is completely abuzz about President-elect Donald Trump’s comments and tweets telling the world that 40 years of work to reduce nuclear weapons in the world is about to go out the window.

From Politico:

President-elect Donald Trump on Friday morning escalated his calls for a stronger U.S. nuclear arsenal, saying he was fine with an “arms race” if it puts the U.S. in a stronger position against foreign adversaries.

“Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” during an off-air conversation on Friday.

The attempt at a clarification came after Trump alarmed some with a vague tweet on Thursday that said, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

The tweet, which threatened to upend longstanding U.S. nonproliferation policy, followed comments from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who called on his country to “strengthen” its nuclear forces.

“We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems,” he said, according to multiple news reports.

CNBC adds:

Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said in several television interviews on Friday that there would not be an arms race because the president-elect would ensure that other countries trying to step up their nuclear capabilities, such as Russia and China, would decide not to do so.

“He’s going to ensure that other countries get the message that he’s not going to sit back and allow that,” Spicer told NBC. “And what’s going to happen is they will come to their senses, and we will all be just fine.”

Asked about the tweet, Trump spokesman Jason Miller later said Trump was “referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it — particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes.”

If Trump and Putin both want to expand nuclear weapons, that would effectively end arms control efforts underway since the Nixon administration, said Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that works to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons.

“This is how arms races begin — with a battle of words,” Cirincione said, urging Trump, a real estate mogul, to “make the biggest deal of his life” and negotiate cuts to the nuclear arsenal with Russia.

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LBJ’s “Daisy” Girl Is Back 52 Years Later Warning Of A Trump Presidency

Monique Corzilius Luiz, who appeared in the infamous LBJ “Daisy” nuclear campaign ad 52 years ago, is back in a new Hillary Clinton spot highlighting Donald Trump’s tempestuous temperament and the dangers of a Trump presidency.

From the Washington Post:

Hillary Clinton opened the last full week of campaigning Monday with a television advertisement revisiting the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad about nuclear weapons, an attempt to shift the presidential election back to a comparison with Donald Trump after a renewed FBI inquiry roiled her campaign.

The new ad features the same woman who, as a small girl, plucked petals from a flower in the original one, which was aimed at Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. The new one returns to a frequent Clinton theme this year – the claim that Trump is reckless and unfit to be commander in chief. The national security comparison has been one of Clinton’s strongest advantages over the Republican businessman in an election she remains favored to win.

The original “Daisy” ad, officially titled “Peace, Little Girl,” famously only aired once, on NBC, on Sept. 7, 1964.

Here’s the original 1964 spot:

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Donald Trump: If We Have Nuclear Weapons, Why Can’t We Use Them?

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough reported that during a foreign policy briefing months ago, Donald Trump repeatedly asked experts “Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”

From the video below:

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on an international level went to advise Donald Trump and three times he [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’ That’s one of the reasons why he just doesn’t have foreign policy experts around him. Three times in an hour briefing, ‘Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”

(h/t JMG)

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Video: Vice-President Dick Cheney “Wrong Then, Wrong Now”

As former Vice-President Cheney continues the rounds of interviews opposing the Iran Nuclear agreement (which gained it’s 42nd vote of support in the Senate yesterday assuring it’s passage), the White House shares this trip on the way-back machine to remind us of how exactly Iran came to even approach being a nuclear threat.

Here’s a hint: Before the Bush/Cheney years, Iran had zero centrifuges. As Bush/Cheney left office, Iran had 5,000.

From the White House YouTube channel:

Vice President Dick Cheney opposes the Iran nuclear deal. If his reasoning sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it from him before on the Iraq war.

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Colin Powell Announces Support For Iran Nuclear Agreement

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell told NBC’s Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” that he supports President Obama’s Nuclear deal for Iran currently being debated in Congress.

Powell said the opponents of the proposal were ignoring the rapid development of Iran’s nuclear program dating back to the Bush years.

“They have been on a superhighway for the last 10 years to create a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program, with no speed limit. And in the last 10 years they have gone from 136 centrifuges up to something like 19,000 centrifuges. This agreement will bring them down to 5,000 centrifuges, all of them under [International Atomic Energy Agency] supervision. And I think this is a good outcome.”

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Maryland Sen. Mikulski Becomes 34th Vote For President Obama’s Iran/Nuclear Agreement

With the announcement by Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, who says she will be the 34th U.S. Senator to vote for President Obama’s Iran/Nuclear deal, Obama gets his foreign policy legacy.

From Huffington Post:

Under the deal, Iran would be subjected to comprehensive inspections on its nuclear program and forced to reduce current uranium stockpiles and the number of its centrifuges. In exchange, it will be granted sanctions relief estimated to be anywhere between $50 billion and $150 billion. But the deal phases out between years 10 and 15, albeit with Iran still forced to provide some access for inspections for another 10 years thereafter. And even for supporters of the initiative, concerns remain about the possibilities of a quick military breakout once restrictions ease.

Faced with this pushback, the administration has implored lawmakers to consider the alternative, in which no restrictions are placed on Iran and the world community is unwilling to rework the accord. A briefing between ambassadors and officials from the other countries party to the deal — in which they articulated their reluctance to head back to the negotiating table — was highly persuasive to several Democratic senators.

Almost every current GOP candidate for president has said they would kill the agreement upon being sworn into office.

Whether such statements can become a reality as so simply stated are another matter. Reneging on an international agreement involving several nations could be more politically complex than tossing out a stump speech.

Democratic leaders say they are still working towards 40 votes in favor of the deal to help keep a resolution of disapproval from getting a vote.

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President Obama Slaps Back At Mike Huckabee Over Iran/Israel Comments

Speaking at a press conference in Ethiopia, President Obama slapped back at current GOP presidential hopefuls who have taken to making “ridiculous” claims about his policies, and “outrageous attacks” that were unbecoming to presidential politics.

The president was asked about Mike Huckabee’s assertion yesterday that the nuclear deal currently under consideration with Iran would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

via Mike Huckabee Twitter

Addressing the question, Obama tied Huckabee’s comments to other Republican 2016 nominees:

“The particular comments of Mr. Huckabee are just part of a general pattern we’ve seen that would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad. We’ve had a sitting senator call John Kerry Pontius Pilate. We’ve had a sitting senator, who also happens to be running for president, suggest that I’m the leading state sponsor of terrorism. These are leaders in the Republican Party.”

Obama later said the comments by Huckabee might be an attempt at getting some attention for his languishing presidential campaign: “Maybe this is just an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines.”

The president summed up the current political environment like this:

“The Republican Party is shocked, and yet that arises out of a culture where those kinds of outrageous attacks have become far too commonplace and get circulated nonstop through the Internet and talk radio and news outlets. And I recognize that when outrageous statements are made about me, a lot of the same people who were outraged when it’s made about Mr. McCain were pretty quiet.”

“The American people deserve better. Certainly presidential debates deserve better. In 18 months, I’m turning over the keys. I want to make sure I’m turning over the keys to somebody who’s serious about the serious problems the country faces and the world faces.”

(source)