{"id":43764,"date":"2019-02-13T06:32:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T11:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43764"},"modified":"2019-02-13T06:33:03","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T11:33:03","slug":"how-many-minutes-to-midnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43764","title":{"rendered":"How Many Minutes to Midnight?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How Many Minutes to Midnight?<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered<\/a> why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can\u2019t use them; who wouldn\u2019t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be \u201cunpredictable\u201d on the subject; who suggested<\/a> that it might not be \u201ca bad thing for us\u201d if Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea all became nuclear powers; who threatened<\/a> North Korea with \u201cfire and fury like the world has never seen\u201d before he became a chummy correspondent<\/a> with its dictator; and who called for a nearly 10-fold<\/a> increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal (among many other, often contradictory, comments he\u2019s made on nuclear matters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, think about the bride, National Security Advisor John Bolton, a \u201cstatesman\u201d who never saw<\/a> a nuclear agreement he didn\u2019t want to nuke. Those included President Richard Nixon\u2019s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bill Clinton\u2019s Agreed Framework with North Korea, President Barack Obama\u2019s Iran nuclear deal (all of which he helped to deep-six), and most recently President Ronald Reagan\u2019s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty (a pact that had actually resulted in thousands of ready-to-use nuclear weapons being scrapped). With the help<\/a> of his neocon bro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton recently succeeded in sticking<\/a> a knife directly in the back of that treaty. He\u2019s undoubtedly now eying the New START treaty, which put limits on long-range nukes and is up for renewal in 2021. (The president has already called<\/a> it \u201cone of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u00a0regular<\/a>\u00a0and former\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>\u00a0columnist James Carroll points out today, the first new member of Trump’s and Bolton’s nuclear family, a \u201clow-yield\u201d nuke, was only recently born and given the less-than-apocalyptic name,\u00a0W76-2<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Many Minutes to Midnight? Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can\u2019t use them; who wouldn\u2019t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be \u201cunpredictable\u201d on the subject; who suggested that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[24387,581,2583,6463,862],"class_list":["post-43764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-james-carroll","tag-nuclear-war","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-tom-dispatch","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43765,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43764\/revisions\/43765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}