With Trump walking away from the Iran deal and lavishing North Korea with praise and legitimacy, his administration has been sending a very clear message: nuclear disarmament is for suckers.

Which will be the first nation to act on this invitation to proliferation? My money is either on Japan or Saudi Arabia.

The Duchy of Grand Fenwick.............according to Leonard Wibberly

PVW said:
With Trump walking away from the Iran deal and lavishing North Korea with praise and legitimacy, his administration has been sending a very clear message: nuclear disarmament is for suckers.
Which will be the first nation to act on this invitation to proliferation? My money is either on Japan or Saudi Arabia.

Your thinking is so yesterday.  Consider this announcement from our President.  See?  It's that easy when you think of life as reality T.V.

Trump declares North Korea 'no longer a nuclear threat'

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/politics/trump-north-korea-nuclear-threat/index.html

Probably Canada and Mexico, they want to be taken seriously by the US too.

I was put in mind of this topic again when I saw this column in the Washington Post opinion section:

Emmanuel Macron is right: NATO is over

The passage that stood out to me:

What can be done? The moment has arrived for France and Germany to adopt more than baby steps to make Europe great again. This would require them to establish a Franco-German condominium to assert their interests, including the joint development of new nuclear weapons to deter Russia and China. It would also allow Europe to win an independent footing from an increasingly hostile United States.

I think that pausing the proliferation of nuclear weapons more than they already had was one of the achievements of Cold War policy; now people are openly arguing for increased proliferation and it disturbs me. In addition the the short-term foreign policy disasters I feared might play out under Trump before his election, this unraveling of the work of non-proliferation was among the long-term foreign policy disasters I feared from him.

On a related topic, how much attention did the mainstream media give to this?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/15/nuclear-weapons-ernest-moniz-accident-risk

Nuclear risk at its highest since Cuban missile crisis, says ex-energy secretary

Nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz says world has been lucky to avoid accidental weapon launch – and risk is growing

Julian Borger in Washington

Fri 16 Feb 2018 02.30 EST Last modified on Fri 16 Feb 2018 17.00 EST

The world has been lucky so far to escape the launch of nuclear weapons through miscalculation, but the odds of such a catastrophic accident are increasing, according to the former US energy secretary Ernest Moniz.

Moniz, a nuclear physicist who played a central role in securing a landmark non-proliferation agreement with Iran in 2015, said the margin for error in avoiding disaster was getting thinner because of the introduction of new, smaller weapons, the broadening of circumstances in which their use is being contemplated, and a lack of high-level communications between major nuclear weapons powers.

Moniz, who is now CEO and co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, pointed to a recent false alarm by Hawaii’s public alert system as the sort of technological glitch that could lead to fatal miscalculation. The alert sent islanders running for cover, and it took nearly 40 minutes for the mistake to be rectified.

“Thirty-eight minutes is substantially longer than the decision time that President Trump or President Putin or other leaders with nuclear weapon states would have for a response to a warning about significant incoming missiles,” Moniz said.

“We know we’ve had those warnings many times in history and we’ve managed so far to dodge the bullet,” he said. “But dodging the bullets is more difficult when there’s not significant communications going on and a lot of tensions between the countries.”

Both the US and the Soviet Union came close to launching their nuclear weapons several times over the course of the cold war because technical glitches or faulty analysis gave the false impression they were under imminent attack.

Moniz said the risks of miscalculation had been further heightened by two elements of the Trump administration’s nuclear posture review, published earlier this month.

The review calls for the development of a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which critics say risks being seen by generals and political leaders as more “usable” than megaton thermonuclear weapons.

The same criticism is made of plans, inherited from the Obama administration, to spend $10bn modernising another tactical nuclear weapon, the B61 gravity bomb.

In a new report this week, the NTI warned that the weapons may be useless as a deterrent and constitute a potentially catastrophic security liability.

Trump’s nuclear posture review also expands the conditions in which the US might consider using its nuclear arsenal to include devastating attacks on infrastructure, including cyber-attacks.

“The use of a new class of submarine-launched smaller weapons seems to us to just add to the issues of miscalculation,” Moniz said. The former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics department added that widening the conditions of nuclear use to include cyber-attack was particularly worrisome as it is rarely absolutely clear who was responsible for such attacks.

“A major infrastructure cyber-attack could not be a nationally endorsed attack at all. It could be from some third-party hackers who might enjoy a nuclear exchange between the two major powers,” he said.

PVW said:

With Trump walking away from the Iran deal and lavishing North Korea with praise and legitimacy, his administration has been sending a very clear message: nuclear disarmament is for suckers.

Which will be the first nation to act on this invitation to proliferation? My money is either on Japan or Saudi Arabia.

 Turkey.  

paulsurovell said:

On a related topic, how much attention did the mainstream media give to this?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/15/nuclear-weapons-ernest-moniz-accident-risk

No idea.  Could you check to see what "mainstream media" said in the year-and-a-half since then, instead of asking others here to find out? 

By the way, other than that nuclear weapons are the subject, it's not otherwise related.