Mark Keown

Further to my blog yesterday, today when asked about his tweet, US President Elect Donald Trump had this response: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” Glorious! Sounds like a game of Survivor: “outwit, outplay, outlast.” Have you noticed that the word Twit is found in the first of these terms? Just saying. I won’t go over the ground I covered in my previous blog in which I suggested that while Donald is right to say that the world needs to come to its senses concerning nuclear weapons, as leader of the “free-world” and “the greatest country on earth,” and as a citizen of this world, he should lead the conversation toward global disarmament. I can hear Hillary’s words in July resounding in my head: "A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” She had her flaws, but one of them wasn’t this kind of macho bravado crap. Incidentally, Vladimir’s response is wonderfully reassuring: “Indeed, they...

So today, December 23, 2016, Donald J. Trump, US president elect, tweeted this: “ The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” President Elect Trump is of course absolutely right in the final part of the Tweet—the world must come to its senses regarding nukes. Nukes are an abomination. This has been seen by the action of his beloved U.S.A., when they nuked Nagasaki and Hiroshima , Aug 6 and 9, 1945. In those bombings, supposedly justified to end WWII—the jury is out on that one—between 150,000 and 226,000 people were killed. It is sobering to thing that today’s nukes are around 3,000 times more powerful than WWII bombs. According to one news report , if the Russians let off one of their ten nukes aimed at New York there would be no survivors within seven to ten km of its epicentre, not to mention the radioactive fallout. If they launched all ten, New York and its peopl...