Trump Gaining Control of Nuclear Weapons ‘Could End Mankind’ Says Director of Top Think Tank

Trump ‘Talking About Nuclear Weapons the Way He Talked About It Is Not Rational’

Spurred by a revelation made by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough this week, nuclear experts are increasingly concerned about a President Trump who would have control of America’s nuclear weapons. 

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert went to advise Donald Trump,” Scarborough told former CIA Director Michael Hayden on-air Wednesday. “And three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons — three times he asked. At one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’”

Scarborough’s remarks moved the political conversation across the nation back to Trump’s comments earlier this year in support of nuclear weapons. “Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?,” Trump said in March.

The Hill interviewed more than a half-dozen nuclear weapons experts, all of whom “expressed a level of concern or anxiety about Trump’s control of nuclear weapons and his leadership of global nonproliferation.” Among them, the U.S. Director of a top-ten international think tank, Mark Fitzpatrick.

“This could really trigger nuclear wars that could end mankind. Is that what he wants?” Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the U.S. office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Hill in a report released Saturday. “Talking about nuclear weapons the way he talked about it is not rational.” 

Trump in the recent past has made clear he is not opposed to other countries gaining nuclear weapons, stating that it’s likely to happen regardless of America’s efforts. In April Trump at a GOP presidential debate said nuclear proliferation is “going to happen anyway.”

Trump also said if countries including Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea had nuclear weapons, “I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us.”

Speaking to what The Hill calls Trump’s “cavalier rhetoric about using nuclear weapons and potentially allowing them to be obtained by U.S. allies,” Fitzpatrick called it “the most dangerous thing that he has said, among many dangerous and stupid things.”

Fitzpatrick’s bio at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) is rather impressive.

 

Image by Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr and a CC license