his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."
In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time.
would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.
The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons.
Ronald Reagan expressed incredulity that he would be allowed only six minutes to decide whether to trigger Armageddon based on blips on a radar screen.
Although no president during the atomic age appears to have ever lost his grip on reality to such an extent that an insane nuclear act might have resulted, top advisers to President Richard Nixon tried to constrain his launch authority during the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced his resignation. His secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, quietly instructed the Pentagon war room to double check with him if Nixon contacted it to order up a nuclear strike. Nixon’s mental stability, and his heavy drinking, caused concern within his inner circle that he might behave erratically out of despair and depression. Alcoholism in a future nuclear monarch is of course quite beyond the pale.
about three serious false alarms in the United States and three in the Soviet Union/Russia that could have led to a very bad call by their leaders have occurred.
Both Putin and President Barack Obama are reminding each other, to a degree we haven’t seen since the Cold War, that they have nuclear buttons at hand.
As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded.
There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.
a common expert view that the bomb is slowly but surely spreading around the world, and that proliferation may be unstoppable unless ALL nations including the nuclear-armed countries get serious about universal nuclear disarmament.
the double-standard of the nuclear “haves,” cigarettes dangling from their lips, lecturing the “have nots” to give up smoking is unsustainable over the long term.
Altogether only 15 minutes would elapse before 850 land- and sea-based missile warheads would take flight. There would be no stopping, no recall, no turning back the salvo. In all likelihood, a return volley of Russian missiles would be triggered. The scale of the ensuing disaster defies comprehension. In a large-scale nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of lives would be extinguished in a few agonizing hours. A global humanitarian catastrophe would ensue to seal the fate of civilization itself.
So far, most respected Republican advisers have boycotted the Trump campaign.
Trump certainly has not yet made a convincing case that we could sleep soundly with him at the helm.
