Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: We interrupt this APR for a message from the emergency broadcast system
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Oh f@ck. That’s not a statement from an big money pundit. That’s the only possible reaction to the news that came at the end of Donald Trump’s Saturday night rally in Nevada. After hours of declaring that Democrats mean mobs and leading the lock ‘er uAbbreviated Pundit Round-up: We interrupt this APR for a message from the emergency broadcast system
Oh f@ck. That’s not a statement from an big money pundit. That’s the only possible reaction to the news that came at the end of Donald Trump’s Saturday night rally in Nevada. After hours of declaring that Democrats mean mobs and leading the lock ‘er up chants, Trump declared that the United States is going to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. Thousands, and thousands. And thousands of new nuclear weapons. If that seems impossible when the US is constrained (thank God) by decades of nuclear treaties that cap the number of weapons in service, The Guardian provides the simple, and simply horrific, answer. Donald Trump has confirmed the US will leave an arms control treaty with Russia dating from the cold war that has kept nuclear missiles out of Europe for three decades. “We’ll have to develop those weapons,” the president told reporters in Nevada after a rally. “We’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out.” Donald Trump is going to pull the United States out of the treaty limiting Intermediate-range nuclear weapons. That treaty, signed by that wimp Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, required the destruction of nearly 2,700 missiles. And it ended what was then the most dangerous part of the nuclear arms race—a race to develop small, “portable” weapons that were more difficult to track and easier to deploy by rail or road. Missiles that were to be scattered over the United State, and Russia, and pretty much everywhere else. Missiles that made the possibility of a nuclear weapon being deployed on a modern battlefield infinitely greater. Those smaller weapons, with warheads only tens or hundreds of more power than the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were solidly in the much-less-unthinkable category for military planners. No one wanted to be the first to hit a major city with an H-bomb, but lobbing a few “battlefield nukes” to soften up those enemy armor columns (literally) looked way too attractive to way too many people. People like John Bolton. Killing the INF is the pure, distilled essence of wet dream for John Bolton. Because he really, truly, not exaggerating, likes the idea of using these things. Not “using them for leverage.” Using them. Don’t worry. I’m getting to the pundits. But until then … worry. Because this is the most staggeringly dangerous move anyone has made since well before the Berlin Wall fell. Read more