U.S. presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard spells out the danger of nuclear war

Was Tulsi Gabbard’s nuclear war warning during Democratic debate hyperbole, or all too real? In a rapid-fire question-and-answer portion of the first Democratic presidential debate Wednesday evening, each candidate was asked about the greatest geopolitical threat to the U.S. abc news, By LEE FERRAN Jun 27, 2019

Multiple candidates mentioned nuclear weapons or nuclear proliferation, but Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii — a combat veteran who served on the armed services and foreign affairs committees — went further, claiming that “we’re in a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history.”

Gabbard’s language might seem hyperbolic, especially to Americans who as children may have participated in “duck and cover” drills amid fears of a Soviet nuclear volley during the Cold War. But experts are split on whether she’s actually that far off — with one saying the nuclear war threat is as dire as ever, and another calling Gabbard’s assessment “nuts.”………,

Wolfsthal noted that the unnerving “Doomsday Clock” created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has tracked the threat of nuclear disaster since the late 1940s, is currently set at two minutes to midnight, where it’s been since January 2018. The Bulletin says that’s “as close to the symbolic point of annihilation that the iconic Clock has been since 1953 at the height of the Cold War” due to the dual threats of nuclear weapons and climate change.

“This suggests that things are as bad as they ever have been, but not worse,” said Wolfsthal, who sits on the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.

In April, a United Nations expert on nuclear disarmament, Izumi Nakamitsu, warned the international body that the threat of nuclear weapons being used, “by accident or through miscalculation, is higher than it has been in decades.”……

Wolfsthal pointed, in part, to the “tone and approach” taken by President Donald Trump with regard to “North Korea, Iran and elsewhere” as contributing to the crisis, as well as tensions with fellow nuclear power Russia over arms control treaties…….

In a speech earlier this month, Gabbard reasoned that “regime change” wars had “exacerbated” the problem of nuclear proliferation, specifically how the value of nuclear weapons was reinforced to North Korean leaders after the international intervention in Libya, and said the U.S. was in a “new arms race” among the major powers, contributing to an almost unprecedentedly unstable nuclear world. ……… https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tulsi-gabbards-nuclear-war-warning-democratic-debate-hyperbole/story?id=63991471

July 1, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | election USA 2020, weapons and war

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