So now we know what prompted Mr. Tillerson to label his boss “a fucking moron.” Via TPM:
According to NBC, at a meeting last summer with top national security officials, President Trump said he wanted a tenfold increase in the size of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Apparently Trump was shown a chart something like this.
As you can see, the size of the US arsenal has declined dramatically since its high in the 1960s. The reasons for that, which President Trump had apparently never heard of, are several. Major reductions came into effect through the late 60s and 1970s, in part tied to a series of arms limitations treaties with the USSR. There was a major drop at the end of the Cold War, codified in other treaties, and another significant reduction early in this century.
The nuclear weapons of today are significantly more advanced than the ones we had in the 1950s and 1960s. We also have agreements which keep key adversaries (specifically Russia) capped at rough parity with the US at the five or six thousand level. There are debates about modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Hardly anyone thinks we should go back to having thirty or thirty five thousand nuclear weapons. It serves no purpose (you can destroy a lot of the world with 6,000), it is highly destabilizing and costs astronomical sums of money. It’s the kind of comment you’d expect from an ignorant and aggressive clown looking at a chart he knows nothing about.
Emphasis mine. In the linked piece, Josh Marshall also discusses the alleged Mattis-Kelly tag-team arrangement to stop Trump if he “lunges” for the nuclear “football” and concludes that our worst fears about putting a malignant narcissist in the White House were wholly justified. Yeah, pretty much.