By Christine Todd Whitman
February 28, 2017
For those of us old enough to remember school bomb drills or the Cuban Missile crisis, the idea of another nuclear arms race is terrifying. It doesn’t take many nuclear weapons to destroy the world as we know it and President Trump’s loose talk about building up our nuclear arsenal may unleash forces that he will be unable to stop.
I realize that this was red meat for CPAC, but he is the President, not a candidate and what he says – every word – matters. If he really wants to be tough, explain what he is doing to back up his words that Russia buzzing our battleships, coming too close to our shores and flying too close to our military aircraft would be “very bad” and he would react.
Kim Jung Un is unstable – it won’t take much taunting to push him over the edge and he has a dangerous stockpile of weapons. Pushing for more nuclear warheads when we already have an arsenal is just the kind of talk that could cause him to do something stupid we would all regret.
Dwight David Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush – to name a few Republican icons – understood the danger of a nuclear war. They didn’t try to build our arsenal and they used every tool at their disposal to ensure it would never need to be used. Don’t forget Reagan’s much-denigrated nuclear shield.
As the White House has had to do on so many occasions already, I hope they will walk back this statement of the President’s immediately.