Donald, "The President," has always been dishonest. Now he is dangerous. Donald Trump clumsily threatened Kim Jong-un. A threat that he likely has not the intention nor the ability to follow through on, certainly not by his lonesome.
Donald Trump said, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with Fire And Fury... like the world has never seen(a reference he seems very fond of).” If you were Trump’s associate ten years ago, you might say that’s just Donald. Yet, he is now the POTUS. His lies and bluster could destroy us all.
And then today on Twitter, just 24 hours later, Donald Trump tweets, “My first order as president was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It’s now far stronger and more powerful than ever before.” I don’t think he realizes what "renovating our nuclear arsenal" would entail. I don't know specifics, but I can tell you it would not happen in one year. Further, it would not happen without spending between 800 and one trillion dollars.
Our arsenal is bigger than your arsenal!
We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 7000 weapons left in our "nuclear arsenal". Some are probably parked near North Korea at this very moment and probably for decades. You can’t just give them a new paint job and set them back up.
They have to be completely rebuilt. Even if it only cost a million per missile to “renovate and modernize”, well, that's a lot of cash to account for if you are gonna claim to have completely renovated that arsenal.
Consider this, it doesn’t cost merely a million dollars to build an intercontinental ballistic missile. There is way more to it than that.
First, you need a properly fitted factory capable of manufacturing them. That costs billions, just for one. The factories that originally built this arsenal, decades ago, have since fallen into disarray. New factories fitted with the latest technologies would have to be built. They have been, but not just this year.
Obama did it
Analysts at the Monterey Institute of International Studies projected a cost of between 872 billion and 1.082 trillion to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. Which, bear in mind, was accounted for in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2010. Signed by Barack Obama and certainly not Donald J Trump.
Writing for the New York Times back on Sept 21, 2014, William J Broad and David E Sanger mentioned a new modernized plant in Kansas City, Missouri, built for the purpose of making the mechanical parts of nuclear missiles. Evidently, this sprawling building, which they said, rivals the Pentagon, is just part of a nationwide push to renovate our nuclear arsenal and it began in 2010, not 7 years later, in 2017.
President Liar Liar
We do have a massive nuclear arsenal that is ready and capable. We have the most formidable military in the world. But, for Donald Trump, this was not enough. In typical ‘Donald’ fashion, he had to tell a bold faced lie which could easily be fact checked.
This sort of behavior from a president won’t likely be viewed by the rest of world the same as it would be coming from a used car salesman or a slum lord. I’m not saying politicians don’t lie. We all know they do. But politicians still follow rules. They are still ‘in it’ for their country.
Donald Trump doesn’t follow rules. He is, clearly, not in it for anything or anyone but Donald John Trump. “The Donald” is impulsive, clumsy, and arrogant.
We should be coldly aware that this is so much more dangerous than Kim Jong-un is right now. And let me add, we do not need to go to war with any country with one as impulsive, arrogant, or ignorant as Donald Trump at the helm. The resultant calamities might be more than the world could handle.
