Freakouts Follow Trump’s “More Nukes” Tweet Which Came Hours After A Similar Message From Putin

The Hill reports:

Arms-control groups said it was unclear what Trump meant by expanding and strengthening nuclear capability, but listed several possible scenarios: building more nuclear-capable systems than planned under the current modernization efforts, having nuclear-capable systems carry the maximum number of warheads possible, creating bombs with more kilotons of nuclear power and increasing the number of warheads in the nuclear arsenal, among other possibilities. Though it remains unclear what prompted the tweet from Trump, the timing raised eyebrows for two reasons.

First, it came a day after Trump met with the chief executives of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two of the country’s biggest nuclear weapons contractors. They are in competition, along with Northrop Grumman, to build the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Air Force, a project expected to cost at least $85 billion.

Second, it came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin made his own statement about strengthening his country’s nuclear arsenal. “We need to strengthen the strategic nuclear forces, for that we should develop missiles capable of penetrating any current and prospective missile defense systems,” Putin said at a Russian Defense Ministry meeting, according to Russian news agency TASS.

Neither Putin nor Trump have indicated the statements were coordinated or in response to one another, but arms control groups were alarmed that they came so close together.

More from NBC News:



Donald Trump stunned nuclear experts Thursday by proclaiming in a tweet that the U.S. should “expand its nuclear capability,” something no president has called for in decades. While President Barack Obama has proposed a $500 billion plan to modernize the aging U.S. nuclear triad, no mainstream voices are arguing to increase the numbers of nuclear weapons beyond the 4,500 the U.S. currently possesses, several experts told NBC News.

“The thrust of U.S. nuclear policy for decades now has been to trim the fat off the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “At a certain point, you are just making the rubble bounce higher.”

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that the Russians “see U.S. modernization plus missile defense plus conventional precision weapons as a serious threat to their nuclear deterrent … they have been doing nuclear saber rattling that has been unprecedented.”