Category: The Washington Free Beacon
Trump Admin Confirms Plans To Introduce 50-Year Mortgage Terms For Homebuyers
‘A complete game changer’
The nukes are fine — the advice is not
Despite his well-known aversion to using the “other N-word” and discussing the issues connected to nuclear deterrence and nuclear saber-rattling by America’s adversaries, the president, during his recent trip to Asia, dropped a bombshell of his own.
On October 29, President Trump posted a brief statement on Truth Social about nuclear weapons testing, which contained the following key points:
- The United States has more nuclear weapons “than any other country.”
- During Trump’s first term in office, the U.S. accomplished a “complete update and renovation” of existing U.S. nuclear weapons.
- Because of other countries’ testing programs, the president has “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
- The process of testing our nuclear weapons “will begin immediately.”
Sadly, whoever provided the president with the background information for each of his statements is manifestly unaware of the easily ascertainable facts. The president is being extremely poorly served by his own staff.
The president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not.
First, the Russian Federation has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Its stockpile of nuclear weapons available to the Russian military is about 5,200, while its overall stockpile is about 5,600. The numbers for the U.S. are about 3,700 and 4,400, respectively. This information is readily available in public sources such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook or the annual assessments published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Second, during the president’s first term, progress was made on the Strategic Modernization Program initiated in 2010. Still, no new platforms (submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, or land-based missiles) were deployed between 2017 and 2021. Instead, we rely today on aging systems that are decades old.
Importantly, a small number of modified, low-yield submarine-launched warheads were produced and placed in service, and development of new Air Force nuclear warheads began, but none were deployed.
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Photo by NASA/Getty Images
Third, the president’s staff has a profound misunderstanding about the difference between the test of a nuclear system’s delivery vehicle (i.e., a ballistic or cruise missile) and the test of a nuclear warhead. In the days before the president’s post, Russia conducted a test of a new cruise missile and a new trans-oceanic torpedo (both of which, incidentally, are not constrained by the new START treaty). Tests of missile systems are commonly conducted by all the nuclear powers, including the United States.
Today, with the sole exception of North Korea in 2017, neither Russia nor China nor any other nuclear power has conducted a nuclear warhead test in this century. To be clear, the U.S. intelligence community has raised concerns that both Russia and China may be covertly carrying out extremely low-yield tests of experimental nuclear designs, but those do not appear to be the “tests” to which the president’s Truth Social post was referring.
Finally, the president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not. That responsibility belongs to the Department of Energy. Based on over 30 years of neglect, that department would be unable today to conduct a nuclear weapon test in the near future. Based on estimates provided by the Department of Energy to Congress, it would take 24-36 months to do so, at a cost of several billion dollars — dollars that have not been authorized or appropriated by Congress.
When asked, on his return flight from Asia, why he had delivered this signal of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons muscle-flexing, the president said he believed that if others were testing, then we should too. Depending on the state of our own nuclear weapons (currently assessed by the military as being reliable), and if he had been properly informed on the facts that others had resumed testing of nuclear weapons, there would be something to this argument. But as things stand, the president owes it to himself and to America’s national security to improve the quality of advice he is being provided on the vital issue of nuclear deterrence and our ability to sustain it — and soon.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
The Weekend Spectator Ep. 51: NYC Democrats Excitedly Choose Socialism
The elections that took place this week are a wake up call for Republicans. Millions of people elected far left…
Trump Tells ‘BIG, BAD Insurance Companies’ What Should Happen To Obamacare Money
‘In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare’
America can’t afford to lose Britain — again
The Labour government that rules the United Kingdom is hardly a year old, but its time is already coming to an end. Its popular legitimacy has collapsed, and it is visibly losing control of both the British state and its territories.
Every conversation not about proximate policy is about the successor government: which party will take over, who will be leading it, and what’s needed to reverse what looks to be an unalterable course. What is known, however, is that the next government will assume the reins of a fading state after what will likely be the final election under the present, failed dispensation.
We should equip our friends on the other side of the Atlantic with the lessons of the new right’s ascendancy and of a nation-first government in America.
The Britain birthed by New Labour three decades ago, deracinated and unmoored from its historic roots, is unquestionably at its end. Its elements — most especially the importation of malign Americanisms like propositional nationhood — have led directly to a country that is, according to academics like David Betz of King’s College London, on the precipice of something like a civil war. That’s the worst-case scenario.
The best case is that a once-great nation made itself poor and has become wracked with civil strife, including the jihadi variety. It is a prospect that will make yesteryear’s worst of Ulster seem positively bucolic.
American policymaking is curiously inert in the face of the dissolution of its closest historic ally. This is not because Britain’s decline is anything new: the slow-motion implosion of that nation’s military power has been known to the American defense establishment for most of the past 20 years. Ben Barry’s excellent new book, “The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975–2025,” offers many examples to this end, including the 2008 fighting in Basra in which American leadership had to rescue a failing British effort.
The knowledge that Britain is facing a regime-level crisis has remained mostly confined to the establishment. Outside of it, the American right has mostly dwelled on an admixture of Anglophilia and special-relationship nostalgia, obscuring the truth of Britain’s precipitous decline.
The American left, of course, entirely endorses what the British regime has done to its citizenry — from the repression of entrepreneurialism and the suppression of free speech to the ethnic replacement of the native population — and regards the outcomes as entirely positive.
It is past time for that inertia to end. The last election will redefine the United Kingdom — and therefore America’s relationship with it. Even before it comes, the rudderless and discredited Labour government has placed Britain into a de facto ungoverned state that may persist for years to come.
The United States has an obligation to protect its own citizenry from the consequences of this reality. It also has what might be called a filial duty to assert conditions for Britain to reclaim itself.
That duty means taking a series of actions, including denying entry to the United States to British officials who engage in the suppression of civil liberties. American security and intelligence should focus on the threats posed by Britain’s burgeoning Islamist population. The U.S. should give preferential immigration treatment to ethnic English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish who are seeking to escape misgovernance or persecution in the United Kingdom.
Furthermore, the United States should make it clear that the robust Chinese Communist Party penetration and influence operations in U.K. governance will result in a concurrent diminishment of American trust and cooperation.
Also necessary is the American government’s engagement with pro-liberty and pro-British elements within the U.K. This means working with Reform U.K., which presently looks to gain about 400 parliamentary seats in the next election. Its unique combination of a dynamic leader in Nigel Farage, intellectual heavyweights like James Orr and Danny Kruger, and operational energy in Zia Yusuf makes it a compelling and increasingly plausible scenario.
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Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Although the Tories are polling poorly and have had their reputations battered by their substandard record in government over the past decade, they nonetheless merit American engagement.
America’s role here is not to endorse, and still less to select, new leadership for Britain, which would be both an impossibility and an impropriety. However, we should equip our friends on the other side of the Atlantic with the lessons of the new right’s ascendancy and of a nation-first government in America.
In the fraught summer of 1940, the American poet Alice Duer Miller wrote, “In a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.” The island nation has not feared its own end at foreign arms for a thousand years. But its crisis today is from within, carrying existential stakes.
The current British regime is nearing its end, and the last election is coming. So too is our decision on how to engage it in the years ahead.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.
Anti-Gun Brady PAC Quietly Yanked Jay Jones Endorsement Over His Violent Text Messages. It Now Claims To Have ‘Proudly’ Supported Him.
A gun control group that rescinded its endorsement of Jay Jones (D., Va.) last month over his text messages fantasizing about shooting a Republican colleague is now claiming to have “proudly” supported the Virginia attorney general-elect after his victory this week.
The post Anti-Gun Brady PAC Quietly Yanked Jay Jones Endorsement Over His Violent Text Messages. It Now Claims To Have ‘Proudly’ Supported Him. appeared first on .
Dems Rejoice as Child Murder Buff Taps Blackface Gov, aka ‘Coonman,’ to Lead Transition Team
Jay Jones made history this week as the first person to be elected attorney general of Virginia after fantasizing about murdering a political opponent’s children and urinating on their graves. So it makes sense that Jones would seek the counsel of another Virginia politician who knows what it takes to overcome a scandal involving moral depravity. (Step 1: Refuse to step down. Step 2: Be a Democrat.)
The post Dems Rejoice as Child Murder Buff Taps Blackface Gov, aka ‘Coonman,’ to Lead Transition Team appeared first on .
Revealed: Iran Orchestrated Plot To Assassinate Israel’s Ambassador to Mexico
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted Israel’s ambassador to Mexico in a thwarted assassination attempt last summer, according to U.S. and Israeli officials cited in an Axios report.
The post Revealed: Iran Orchestrated Plot To Assassinate Israel’s Ambassador to Mexico appeared first on .
California Congressman Who Campaigned on No Corporate PAC Money Pledge Takes Tens of Thousands of Dollars From Corporate PACs
As a fresh-faced political candidate, Rep. Derek Tran (D., Calif.) promised voters he wouldn’t accept donations from corporate PACs. But once elected, he broke his word and accepted tens of thousands of dollars from corporate benefactors, campaign finance records show.
The post California Congressman Who Campaigned on No Corporate PAC Money Pledge Takes Tens of Thousands of Dollars From Corporate PACs appeared first on .
