To distract from the pandemic, the Trump administration has decided to revive fears of nuclear war. A few days ago, it announced it would end an arms control agreement with Russia.
Now it is hinting at conducting a nuclear bomb test, the first since 1992.
The Trump administration has discussed whether to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992 in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for relations with other nuclear powers and reverse a decades-long moratorium on such actions, said a senior administration official and two former officials familiar with the deliberations.
The matter came up at a meeting of senior officials representing the top national security agencies May 15, following accusations from administration officials that Russia and China are conducting low-yield nuclear tests — an assertion that has not been substantiated by publicly available evidence and that both countries have denied.
A senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive nuclear discussions, said that demonstrating to Moscow and Beijing that the United States could “rapid test” could prove useful from a negotiating standpoint as Washington seeks a trilateral deal to regulate the arsenals of the biggest nuclear powers.
. . . I guess there was no one there to stick up for the environment, or someone who remembers Japan and the Enola Gay? or any number of other questions? CBK
Is there a hole somewhere that Trump can fall into and never be found again?
There are lots of holes in Yucca Flat where they did the nuclear tests
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nevada_Test_Site_craters.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
I hope The Washington Post reporters have not been baited with misinformation. I see that the Post’s article is quoted by Barrons (not behind a paywall).
In any case the proposal–leak–is said to be from anonymous sources.
Who knows how serious this idea is without some additional information such as a contract for work, budget item or discussion, some other source?
Even if it is “just a rumor,” the reasoning, such as it is, is consistent with the idiotic thinking of Trump and his campaign advisors who, at minimum, want a serious distraction from COVID-19 bungling, declining support according to polls, and Trump’s pitiful need to be perceived as a strong man on the world stage. https://www.barrons.com/news/us-discussed-holding-first-nuclear-test-in-decades-report-01590214504
Don’t need a nuclear test.
There are Dept. of Energy software codes written to simulate in detail these nuclear explosions.
If that jerk tRump is testing “new” weapons of mass destruction, this can also be simulated.
This is another attempt by tRump to distract people from his failure to respond to the
Covid-19 pandemic.
tRump is America’s National Security threat and will pull more stunts like this and I hope as a country we are prepared to invoke the 25th.
tRUMP is our “Darwinian” and “Pear Harbor” moment. tRump is far worse than Covid-19. tRump is a sick person in all ways. He needs to (fill in the blank).
Classic “sabre rattling.”
More needless distraction and waste like the space force. Next up: building a better ironclad than either the Monitor or Merrimack.
lol. The Time Force, to go back and help the Continental Army take over the airports from the British.
Why does this surprise anyone? It was only a matter of time. He loves the outrageous and anything that he can envision his goose-stepping falling-all-over-his angry white man raising their fists to at a rally. “Nuke ’em” Yeh, do that maga-man. “Grab ’em” Yeh, do that maga-man. We want smoke stacks and coal mines! “Yeh, do that, too.” “Segregate ’em” Definitely do that pre-1954 wannabe man.
Heck, if he were at all organized or a planner, this would be on a list of “things to do that make me different from every other post-Eisenhower President?” He so envies the Marlboro Man, Rat-Pack, Hugh Hefner, John Galt club.
Add that to his impulsive, self-absorbed, jealous (of Obama), have-to-please-daddy pyche and this is one dangerous man with launch codes. Or at least one dangerous man with a scared-you-know-less Senate and Supreme Court in his pocked.
I think it’s more bluster to distract from the economy/Covid situation. The rat lies on a regular basis. Sure, this can’t be ignored, but it’s likely just another attempt to distract.
I have known several “down wonders–” people in Utah who died of cancers caused by being down wind of the nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950 s. This is NOT a joke or distraction. It’s deadly serious.
How many will die because of the Trump regime’s disgusting incompetence?
Yup. How many Americans will go the way of John Wayne? https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuclear-fallout-hollywood-john-wayne
Before the atmospheric test ban in 1963, the US government ran the tests at the Nevada Test Site specifically when the wind was blowing away from Las Vegas and toward St. George, Utah.
Despite knowing full well the dangers of radioactive fallout, government officials never warned “downwinders” about the dangers of being outside so people in St George would go out on their porches — many with their young children — to watch the blasts and mushroom clouds. It became a form of “entertainment”.
Decades later epidemiology studies showed cancer concentrations downwind of the testing — not surprisingly.
After the atmospheric test ban, they moved the tests underground, but even so, several tests breached the surface and “vented” into the atmosphere, including the Baneberry “incident” in 1970, which sent a massive plume of radioactive dust thousands of feet into the atmosphere.
As Yvonne points out above, there is no need to restart testing to verify the reliability of the US nuclear stockpile, since scientists can do computer simulations.
The only reason for restarting testing would be to develop NEW devices and there are undoubtedly some who would like to do just that.
But that would be a very dangerous and foolish thing to pursue because, among other things, it would reignite the nuclear arms race.
It wasn’t just St. George either. Pretty much all of Utah was covered in radiation. One of our former governors actually died of down wind cancer, and my own father, who died of leukemia at age 46, may have been a downwinder, too.
Sorry to hear about your father.
The people of Utah paid a very high price for the nuclear arms race.
Not just for testing but also for uranium mining in southern Utah.
The people were dismissed like so much detritus. It really was unconscionable the way they were treated.
Testing is really the key to developing new nuclear weapons which would ignite a new nuclear arms race not just with Russia but also with China so talk of resuming testing is very worrisome.
It’s unfortunate that treaties can be so easily thrown out by presidents and the stupid political hacks they surround themselves with.
Vlad’s Agent Orange, aka Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA), the Moronavirus trumpinski orangii, has delivered for his handler in Moscow, big time. Vlad certainly has gotten his money back on his enormous investment in getting the 73-year-old reality TV star in the orange clown makeup elected. As you doubtless know, Trump has undermined our relations with other member states of NATO and has repeatedly expressed to aides his desire to withdraw from the alliance, and he withdrew from Northern Syria, leaving our allies, the Kurds, defenseless and leaving control of Syria to the Russians. Something particularly disturbing, about which I have seen very little in the press, is that Comrade Donnie has withdrawn the U.S. from the INF Treaty (which limits nuclear weapons development) AND the Open Skies Treaty (which allows the U.S. and the Russians to fly over one another’s territories to do aerial surveillance to ensure treaty compliance), and he has done this at a time when Russia is moving aggressively ahead with a great many new military technologies, including new technologies to defeat anti-ballistic missiles and new hypersonic missiles. The new Russian hypersonic glide vehicle can fly low enough to avoid anti-ballistic missile systems and can carry a nuclear MIRV payload (several warheads that are independently targeted).
And as of a couple days ago, a Trump loyalist has been placed in charge of the U.S. intelligence services.
George Dumbya Bush pulled out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002.
It was entirely predictable except to a brain dead monkey like Dumbya that Putin would subsequently pursue means to evade an ABM system, particularly one that was emplaced close to Russia.
There are very good reasons for agreements like the ABM Treaty and the Test Ban Treaty, but some people are simply not smart enough to understand those reasons.
The first time Trump proposed the unqualified John Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence, both Republicans and Democrats knocked down the idea. Now the GIP is completely supine. They have given up caring.
This is very disturbing. The Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, both Trump yes men. Very, very scary. These are extraordinarily powerful positions.
Bob It’s not a “given” in this case (yet), but you, others here, and anyone who knows anything about fascism knows this is how it works–timed according to specific circumstances that unfold to their liking (or that they create): consolidation of power; lies, lies and more lies; the disregard of the law for them, but holding other to it; a surrounding group of thugs and sycophants; and the acquiescence of fearful, unorganized, ultimately cowardly, but otherwise civilized people.
It’s not like we don’t know what it looks like. I think the problem is similar to Lynn Boddy’s cancer occurring from nuclear downwind . . . like the perennial destructiveness of nuclear bombs, fascism can get lost to history . . . if “we” don’t keep telling it to those who were born long after it occurred. Those of us who experienced it are too easy to think others remember it like we do–but those were born later and who DIDN’T experience it firsthand, or in newspaper headlines of the day, need to be educated about it.
And, might I recall an education that marginalizes or eliminates the formal study of history, not to mention the specifically-political kind.
The irony is that we make sure our students know science and technology–while our ignorant and morally bankrupt use of it conditions the rise of fascism and downwind cases like Lynn Boddy’s.
As an afterthought, and though I don’t like much of his politics, the more that goes forward with Trump and our Cowardly Republicans in Congress, the more heroic Mitt Romney becomes in my eyes. CBK
I disagree with Romney and a great many things, and I was never of his political party, but I lived in Massachusetts when he was governor, and he seemed to me, then, a sincere and well-meaning fellow. He definitely worked with people across the aisle from him, and of course, Obamacare is the program that he came up with for Massachusetts. It was Romneycare before it was Obamacare. It disheartened me when he was running for President and felt the need to shift rightward and denounce what was, after all, his own program, one that he had previously and rightly been proud of. I don’t like the program. I want Medicare for All and consider Romneycare/Obamacare as being but another excuse for keeping in place the role of the healthcare racketeers in the U.S., who siphon off HALF our healthcare dollar into inflated executive compensation and profits while delivering demonstrably inferior service. But it was a compromise better than nothing, when is what Trump has put forward.
Supine. Perfect word choice.
Romney looks reasonable compared to Trump, but he’s always been a fake.
He claims to be a self made gazillionaire when the reality is that he got start from his fathers millions.
He claims to represent ordinary people when the reality is that his former company (Bain Capital) made money by taking over companies and ruthlessly firing workers.
When he was running for guv in Massachusetts, he was simultaneously claiming residency in both MA and Utah to hedge his bets. He had his eyes on a Senatorial job if he did not win the governorship.
I too lived in MA when he was elected and it simply amazed me how completely clueless the Democrats who voted for him were.
They either didn’t know who he was of didn’t care.
Massachusetts is perhaps the best proof is that being highly educated and clueless are not mutually exclusive.
And Harvard and MIT (where scientists were galavanting with and accepting money from known pedophile Jeffrey Epstein) are perhaps the best proof of all.
Romney is up to his usual elitist tricks at this very moment.
“,A proposal by Sen. Mitt Romney to establish congressional committees with the specific goal of crafting legislative “solutions” for America’s federal trust fund programs has reportedly resurfaced in GOP talks over the next Covid-19 stimulus package, sparking alarm among progressive advocates who warn the Utah Republican’s bill is nothing but a stealth attack on Social Security and Medicare.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/22/gop-plot-gut-social-security-behind-closed-doors-gains-steam-senate-covid-19-talks
I am a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma survivor from 1976. I lived on a George AF base that is now a Superfund site, while I was pregnant and found the swollen lymph gland. I ended up with radiation treatment as my only treatment after my spleen and appendix were removed and major organs biopsied. The radiation I was given was way too much, because they didn’t know enough about what dosage was too much back then. I now have two leaky heart valves, calcification of my heart and carotids small nodules on my thyroid that are being watched, a tiny aneurysm, radiation fibrosis syndrome which can cause head drop without physical therapy often. All this is a result of living on a highly contaminated base and then not being told anything about it until recently. I am appalled at the absolute disregard Trump and his cronies are showing for people like me. There are many more like us. I urge all people to speak up about this. More people will end up like me. I’m thankful I’m here, but I should never have gone through any of this in the first place.
Lynn Boddy Thank you for speaking up about this. CBK
The first cancer patient I worked with who became a close personal friend grew up downwind on the Oregon side of the notorious Hanford nuclear site in Washington. He was very young and suffered a great deal at the end of his life before dying in 2002, after which I went through a year long depression and didn’t want to get close to any patients again. You make an important observation.
These Dr. Strangeloves always describe their new technologies as necessary for deterrence, as making things safer, and as being, themselves, failsafe. We know the history of THAT: https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/jun/13/remembering-near-disaster-us-accidentally-drops-nu/
Imagine, we almost had a large section of the East Coast of the United States blown away because of a series of mechanical errors. And most Americans don’t even know about this, or about Hanford, the most polluted area of the United States, or about the U.S. Titan nuclear missile that blew up in its silo in 1980 in the so-called Damascus Incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion).
What should the U.S. be doing? Calling the world together to stop this madness, reining in itself AND Russia and other nuclear powers.
Highly recommended:
Command and Control: Schlosser, Eric. Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. A breathtaking read.
Oh my Lord, Ms. Boddy. Horrfic. So terrible that your country did this to you!!!
“A few days ago, it announced it would end an arms control agreement with Russia.”
The act of a true Putin puppet.
dienne77,
YES indeed, “The act f a true Putin puppet.”
tRump works of Putin, his $$$$$ bag and conspirator in crime.
I shouldn’t, but this is an example of the proverbial low-hanging fruit. John Quincy Adams said the most important lesson he learned about politics was “To do a thing, by assuming the appearance of preventing it. To prevent a thing by assuming that of doing it.”
For the U.S. to consider a policy of starting nuclear arms development will drain substantial resources at the same time they should be directed to support the American people during the pandemic and its recovery. It also funnels large amounts of public money to a new military project at a time when defense spending consumes an obscene amount of annual appropriations.
The goal of Putin is not gain power in the U.S., it is to sow chaos and discontent so that the American system of governing will break down and become unmanageable; it is the same goal of meddling with other democratic nations. This is the fundamental part of the plan. So, yes. This really is the act of a true Putin puppet.
I think that Putin has been laughing his tushy off for the the past three years. I can just see him in the Kremlin saying to his cronies, back in 2014-15, “I know. There’s this guy we’ve been cultivating for decades, Donald Trump, in hopes he might prove useful. A wannabe playboy, failed businessman, a complete moron, doesn’t know borscht from batsh*t, and totally ours because we’ve got the Devil’s dacha full of goods on him–the tape, Epstein, the models, the money laundering. What if we gave them HIM as president? They would be so _______ed.”
“The act of a true Putin puppet.”
Is that supposed to be sarcasm?
Is your point that Putin WANTS to have an arms agreement with the US?
What has Trump ever done that Putin doesn’t like? End an arms agreement with them? Really? You think Putin is sobbing into his pillow or cursing in the wind because Trump ended an arms agreement?
Trump is Putin’s puppet. Whether Trump has convinced himself that he is only doing Putin’s bidding because it’s good for Donald Trump or whether Trump is doing Putin’s bidding because of another reason (blackmail? Huge loans Trump can’t pay back?) is certainly still up for debate.
If the US breaks the nuclear agreement with Russia, then Russia will be free to do the same.
A great short story about this, ideal for use in English classes from about grade 8 up.
https://www.you-books.com/book/F-Brown/The-Weapon
That’s a good one. Even for grizzled old adults. In case you were unaware, niemand is the German word for nobody or no one. I guess in this case, the author intended it to be Mr. Anybody.
For you, Bob:
lol. love it
RE: SomeDam and Bob: Regarding Romney–I get what you are saying–but to Bob who wrote: “It disheartened me when he was running for President and felt the need to shift rightward and denounce what was, after all, his own program, one that he had previously and rightly been proud of.”
My hopeful guess is that his conscious suffered for that, and that (perhaps?) his performance in the impeachment hearings was a result of that not-again experience. But who can forget that 1 percent video, Romney, but also the people in that room?
But was that speech indicative of the reality of his bifurcated character, or a slippage of conscience under the pressures of politics? CBK
I feel the same way about Dole that Bob does about Romney. I worked in the Senate at the end of GHW Bush’s and the beginning of Clinton’s administrations and because of some of the issues I worked on got to see Dole up close and personal on a number of occasions at small receptions. I don’t think I ever engaged a more friendly and humorous person in my time up there. He was horrible in front of large audiences and completely relatable in small rooms–pretty much the opposite of Clinton. I didn’t agree with him, but had great respect for him and how he acted as leader until he decided to run for president. That left the door open for Gingrich to irreparably destroy congressional procedure. We haven’t had a sane appropriations cycle since and every other dysfunction flows from that reality. I believe in retrospect that the Dole would have stayed in the Senate and kept order if he had the choice of a do-over.
What a mess!
Please vote