Weekly Standard Writer Slams Trump Over Report That He Might Consider Nuclear First Strike

John Noonan: “Does [Trump] Understand Just How F’ing Dangerous That Is?”

Written by Craig Harrington

Published

A conservative national security expert and Weekly Standard writer responded with horror to a report that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly asked his foreign policy advisers, “Why can't we use nuclear weapons?"

During an August 3 interview with former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough relayed how “a foreign policy expert” advising Trump told Scarborough that Trump had asked the adviser three times, “If we have [nuclear weapons], why can’t we use them?” According to the network, Scarborough only learned of Trump’s baffling approach to the United States’ nuclear arsenal “in the last few days” before reporting it. From Morning Joe:

Conservative national security analyst John Noonan -- who periodically writes about national defense issues for The Weekly Standard and previously served as an adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and to 2016 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush -- slammed Trump on Twitter. Noonan’s nuclear expertise stems from his U.S. Air Force service, including work as a missile-launch officer at a nuclear silo in Wyoming. Noonan wondered if Trump understands “how F’ing dangerous” his foreign policy stances are, hit the nominee for “undoing 6 decades of proven deterrence theory,” and lamented the position of officers down the chain of command who are “[w]ondering if they’ll soon answer to a madman”:

Noonan was not alone in criticizing Trump’s reported interest in using nuclear weaponry. Steve Breen, an editorial cartoonist for the right-leaning San Diego Union-Tribune, mocked the nominee with a depiction of a hypothetical President Trump being physically restrained from launching a nuclear assault in response to criticism from a constituent in Wichita, Kansas: