“The man who laughs,” warned the poet Bertolt Brecht, “has simply not yet heard the horrible news.” President Donald Trump’s control of U.S. nuclear forces is no longer a laughing matter.
Further, no longer does such a concerning conclusion have to be extrapolated from this president’s overall indifference to reason, facts and logic. Now, instead, it flows directly and unambiguously from his explicit press conference declaration last week that, regarding a Russian ship off the East coast, “the greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that’s 30 miles offshore right out of the water.” There was absolutely no defensible reason for this gratuitous declaration. These are not the musings of an ordinary or normal American president. Rather, extraneous to any other purpose than incessantly bizarre self-promotion, they represent revealingly clinical warnings of deep emotional disturbance, especially when examined together with other blatant and incontestable signs of malignant narcissism. Naturally, all decent and informed U.S. citizens will hesitate to concur offhandedly, or to in any way appear disrespectful to longstanding presidential authority, but there now also exists a much higher citizen obligation: This is the unavoidable responsibility to speak openly and candidly about a plainly emerging existential threat.
To be sure, as I know personally from almost 50 years of scholarship involving core matters of U.S. senior command authority (National Command Authority, or NCA), there are various institutional protections built into any presidential order to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, virtually all of these safeguards are prescriptively operational only at lower command levels, and not at the very highest level of decisional authority. In other words, succinctly, there are no permissible or codified legal grounds to disobey a presidential order to use nuclear weapons. This means, inter alia, that if a U.S. president were sometime to issue an irrational nuclear order, the only way for the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and possibly several relevant others to obstruct this unwarranted order would be prima facie illegal. Of course, such informal safeguards might still manage to succeed, but we really ought to inquire, now, about implementing certain other more suitably predictable and formally structural impediments….
…..Thus far, we have witnessed a new president who inappropriately analogizes the conduct of world affairs to real estate haggling, and who confuses personal bluster and bravado for usable strength and power. More than anything else, we must now prepare to speak more openly about this confusion, and also about Trump’s correspondingly dangerous behaviors. American national security can never be properly served by a president who proudly announces his own decisional infallibility (“I alone can fix it”), and who identifies growing international chaos as a distinctly positive negotiation opportunity.http://www.usnews.com/opinion/world-report/articles/2017-02-21/the-existential-threat-of-donald-trump-and-nuclear-weapons
The Trump Nuclear Threat, It’s time to worry about Donald Trump’s control of U.S. nuclear forces. US News, By Louis René Beres | Feb. 21, 2017,
nuclear-news 
Reality is that which, when you wish it would go away, it does not.
 Majia@asu.edu
I read Stuart bramhalls site. I do no agree with her and her articles. She is an alt liberal. One that thinks the neocon Democrats were more dangerous than trump. Trump is doing no good. Trump has set up a for-profit racist, government. Him, and his cronies, will suck america dry. The fascists will have a constitutional convention and obliterate everything that has made america great. Public schools. Fire departments. A decent postal system.
The conservatives are responsible for the nuclear weapons everywhere. The nuclear waste everywhere. The clunky stupid old nuclear reactors every where that are ready to explode or blow up like fukushima because they are 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years old. Their metallic guts are brittle and desintigrating from constant radiation bombardment. Nuclear power was always an evil lie. Nuclear reactors will start exploding if there is no supervision of them, from neglect. Reactor rod storage pools will catch fire from neglect. Those pools store tons of plutonium rods that have to be constantly cooled with water. If not, they will irradiate thousands of mile swaths of land.
There are hi level nuclear waste dumps everywhere in the united states. In texas, Utah, Tennessee, Nevada, New Mexico by los alamos. They just lie about it. It is Parked high-level nuclear waste. It is not buried. It is above ground,. It will start catching fire and exploding if any thin flammable is around it.
Our drinking water will be so contaminated, that people will die enmasse. Trump has already raised the allowable radiation, in drinking water thousands of time.  The same will occur for food, air, and soil.  Evil nihilistic people like tillerman , koch brothers, price, bannon, trump, and the trump nutcases will die too. What a bunch of dumb mean people. All over their cherished-selfish, idiot-ology and greedÂ
> Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 11:50 AM