Trump’s North Korea tweets shatter decades old nuclear taboo
Channel: ZSTY011 NEWS
Date: 07/01/2018

Trump’s North Korea tweets shatter decades-old nuclear taboo.

President Ronald Reagan was warming up for a national radio address on Aug. 11, 1984, when an open microphone caught him joking about nuclear war.

“My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever,” Reagan quipped. “We begin bombing in five minutes.”The international outcry that followed — newspapers condemned Reagan, and some Soviet forces were reportedly placed on alert — underscored one of the first rules of the American presidency: Don’t speak lightly about nuclear weapons.

To President Donald Trump’s critics, that is one of many norms he has recklessly shattered, most recently with a tweet on Monday in which Trump declared that his “nuclear button” was “much bigger [and] more powerful” than the one North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, claimed in a recent speech to have on his desk.
Democrats and foreign policy experts fiercely denounced Trump’s rhetoric as alarming and dangerous.

“This is not a game,” former Vice President Joe Biden told NBC News on Wednesday. “This is not about, ‘Can I puff my chest out bigger than yours.’ It’s just not presidential.”

Beyond the sheer terror that nuclear war invokes, experts said, one reason for the backlash is the way Trump has shattered the rules long observed by presidents and senior U.S. officials in their discussions of atomic weapons. For decades, political and military leaders have carefully sidestepped explicit references to the use of nuclear arms, preferring careful euphemism to Trump’s blunt language.

“You don’t brandish these weapons. You allude to them, obliquely,” said Joe Cirincione, a former congressional aide and president of the pro-disarmament Ploughshares Fund.

Asked whether he would rule out a nuclear strike on Iran in 2007, for instance, President George W. Bush replied tersely: “All options are on the table.” Four years earlier, the Bush White House warned Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein against the use of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S would “use whatever means necessary” to defend itself, warned White House chief of staff Andrew Card — language widely interpreted as referring to a nuclear response.

James Jay Carafano, a military analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in an online video Wednesday that Trump’s tweet signaled no shift in U.S. policy and that “pundits and reporters obsessing about Trump’s tweets” had wildly overreacted.
We’ve always said we will retaliate” against a North Korean atomic strike “with nuclear weapons,” Carafano said, adding that “statecraft is not just about what people say. It’s about what people say in the context of what they do.”

But many nuclear experts disagree, warning that Trump’s rhetoric could augur a dangerous change in public discourse about nuclear weapons.

“Most presidents and other world leaders have recognized that nuclear weapons are in a different class in the kind of massive destruction they would bring about, not just to military targets but to civilians,” said Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia. “They have not used language indicating that nuclear weapons are like any other weapon.”

“That has been the norm. And clearly that norm has been broken down,” added Nunn, who supported major Cold War nuclear arms spending but now advocates dismantling those weapons as head of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative. “The failure to distinguish nuclear weapons from other weapons — treating them as just another weapon that is usable — increases the risk and lays the foundation for some kind of catastrophic blunder.”

That thinking has likely governed the rhetoric of past U.S. presidents who have made clear to enemies that America is prepared to use nuclear weapons against them, but without using phrases like “nuclear button.”

During a July 1993 visit to South Korea, President Bill Clinton said the U.S. would “quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate” if North Korea ever used a nuclear device. “It would mean the end of their country as they know it,” Clinton said.

Nunn and others said loose talk about nuclear threats could lead enemies like North Korea to misunderstand American intentions and strategic tripwires.

“These childish attacks raise the risk of stumbling into an avoidable war,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) tweeted Wednesday.

Trump’s own official national security strategy, unveiled by the White House last month, seems to underscore the importance of clear communication about nuclear arms.

“To avoid miscalculation,” the document says, “the United States will conduct discussions with other states to build predictable relationships and reduce nuclear risks.”Cirincione noted that past presidents had spoken most openly about nuclear weapons to warn of their destructive power.

“They spoke in awe of the power of these weapons,” he said. “They have talked about the threat of nuclear weapons, the dangers of nuclear weapons — not about th