I love the smell of thermonuclear warheads in the morning sunPresident Trump said Thursday he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal so that it is at the “top of the pack.”
“I am the first one that would like to see everybody — nobody have nukes, but we’re never going to fall behind any country, even if it’s a friendly country. We’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power,” Trump said in an interview with Reuters.
"It would be wonderful — a dream would be that no country would have nukes — but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”
The interview also touched on Russia’s violation of an arms control treaty, North Korea’s ballistic missile tests and China’s ability to pressure Pyongyang.
Trump also claimed the U.S. has “fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity,” according to Reuters.
Trump previously called in a December tweet for the U.S. to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
The December comment drew consternation from arms control advocates, who said the U.S.’s current 30-year, $1 trillion nuclear modernization efforts and 7,000 existing nuclear warheads are already more than enough.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that Trump was “very clear” that the U.S. cannot “yield its supremacy to anybody.”
“That’s what he made very clear in there in that if other countries have nuclear capabilities, it will always be the United States that has the supremacy and commitment to this,” Spicer said at Thursday’s press briefing.
“The question that was asked was about other people that were growing their stockpiles.”
In the Reuters interview, Trump slammed the New START Treaty with Russia that caps the number of nuclear warheads the U.S. and Russia can deploy, calling it “a one-sided deal.”
"Just another bad deal that the country made, whether it's START, whether it's the Iran deal,” he said. “We're going to start making good deals.”
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/320899-trump-calls-for-building-up-nuke-arsenal-to-be-top-of-the-pack
