Interview: Trump's nuclear insecurities and other secrets from the author of "The Bomb"

[soryang]

Interview: Trump’s nuclear insecurities and other secrets from the author of “The Bomb”
By Dawn Stover, February 4, 2020
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In this interview, Bulletin contributing editor Dawn Stover speaks with Fred Kaplan about his just-published book, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (Simon & Schuster). Kaplan is a national-security columnist for Slate and the author of five other books, including The Wizards of Armageddon, a 1983 book on the origins of American nuclear strategy. He has a PhD in political science from MIT....

...Kaplan describes a July 2017 meeting in “the Tank,” the Joint Chiefs’ conference room at the Pentagon where Trump not only unloaded on Cabinet secretaries and generals who were trying to school him on military history and policy, but also questioned why he couldn’t have as many nuclear weapons as past presidents had. Kaplan also talks about the Trump administration’s first-strike war plan for responding to North Korean missile and nuclear weapons testing, the massive overkill built into US nuclear plans targeting the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the conundrum of “limited” nuclear war, and why John F. Kennedy—who saw only one way out of the rabbit hole—was the smartest president when it came to nuclear weapons.

For the interview transcript:

https://thebulletin.org/2020/02/interview-trumps-nuclear-insecurities-and-other-secrets-from-the-author-of-the-bomb/#