Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House

As reported by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair.

The article begins:

Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities?

It includes a lengthy discussion of one of the single gravest threats to the United States: nuclear weaponry.

This includes not only nuclear weapons accidents within the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal itself, but also the risks from North Korea's dramatic recent advances in nuclear weaponry -- including the risk that U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will stumble into a war, thanks to their bellicose rhetoric back and forth.

Another high risk discussed in the article involves issues swirling around Iran's nuclear power program. As the article makes clear, the biggest risk of all is that President Trump and his administration will rip up the successful Iran Nuclear Deal. This could result in Iran developing nuclear weapons. Or it could result in a war between the U.S. and Iran, in a supposed attempt to prevent nuclear proliferation (which the Iran Nuclear Deal is actually accomplishing currently).

Trump warns China U.S. could go it alone in pressuring North Korea after apparent ICBM test launch

As reported by the New York Times, Donald J. Trump warned Chinese President Xi that the U.S. could strike out alone in pressuring North Korea, after yesterday's missile launch that many analysts fear was a successful test of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), capable of reaching Alaska.

The U.S., China, and North Korea each have nuclear weapons arsenals (although the U.S.'s dwarfs the other two, especially North Korea's), and itself regularly has tested ICBMs for decades (as from Vandenberg Air Force Base in CA, to the Marshall Islands).

Let's not test the explosion of a 21st century nuclear arms race

Op-ed by Kathy Crandall Robinson, senior fellow at Women In International Security, published in The Hill.