George W. Bush invaded Iraq to remove its – ultimately nonexistent – weapons of mass destruction. Barack Obama used cyber weaponry and sanctions to deter Iran from building its own atomic bomb. Now Donald Trump faces North Korea, but stopping its nuclear and missile program may prove impossible, creating what may be his first and perhaps defining international crisis. -Reuters

President Donald Trump is being urged to confront North Korea and also to build up the army which, some say, has been neglected in the Obama years and even before.

He needs to do this as well because North Korea is supposedly getting close to having a usable nuclear force.

This is a crisis everyone has seen coming. That’s why Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been so desperate to court Trump, visiting him even before the inauguration. As North Korea launched an intermediate medium-range ballistic missile on Sunday, Abe was once again with the president – this time on a golf and bonding trip to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida retreat.

… Pyongyang first demonstrated its ability to detonate a crude nuclear device in 2006 – becoming the only Iraq- or Iran-style “rogue state” to ever get that far. Since then, it has continued to develop not just the bombs but also the missiles to deliver them.

Ultimately, the regime would love to have the ability to strike the continental United States – a prospect Trump has tweeted to say “won’t happen”. For now, however, there are few signs anyone has a plan to stop it.

The article goes on about North Korea’s land-based “nuclear rockets” and the progress it is making in creating and distributing them.

But who is making these claims? One of the only ways to know is to measure earth quakes. America is doing that, but the Pentagon has nearly as many reasons to exaggerate the North Korean threat as North Korea itself.

We don’t believe that North Korea has much in the way of nuclear weapons. It may have none at all. Not even the “mini-nuke” that you can possibly pick up in both hands. But with Trump banging the drums for more armament, North Korea has suddenly become a big threat to the United States.

There is no real evidence for North Korea having a large nuclear force. But because we are told it is so, we should believe it. These are the same kind of observations that go back some 75 years to Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though its fairly clear that both cities were firebombed.

Some sort of nuclear device may have been dropped as well, but if it was nuclear device it wasn’t a very effective one. Crawford F. Sams, who ran the post-war nuclear program in Japan has said,

When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed [in Hiroshima] – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation … You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent …

When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing! …

You don’t hear much about the effects of Nagasaki because actually it was pretty ineffective. That was a narrow corridor from the hospital … down to the port, and the effects were very limited as far as the fire spread and all that stuff. So you don’t hear much about Nagasaki.

It makes very little sense that nuclear weapons have been around for 75 years but never have been used. Never as in not once. Except for the supposed uses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there is a good deal of doubt they were actually used then. In fact, they are still basically the same size and shape.

Trump seems determined to build up the military to a size never before seen. In this he may agree with Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas and Sen. John McCain of Arizona. These two have asked for base military budget of $640 billion in 2018. That would be $100 billion more than in 2017.

The larger picture according to Pentagon budgets is up to one trillion over the next ten years or so to dramatically hike the Pentagon’s nuclear forces.

But the  entire history of nuclear warfare is muddied by a lack of real reporting and credible eye witnesses. The New York Times had only one reporter assigned to nuclear weapons during their formative years. That person turned out to be on the Pentagon payroll as well.

Conclusion: There are a good many questions as to how nuclear weapons work – and if they work and when they work. Before we spend another $1 trillion adding to such weapons, we should ask some hard questions about them. We shouldn’t believe everything we hear. When it comes to America’s “nuclear program” we should be skeptical.