Trump adviser believes in ‘winning’ nuclear war

This 12 September 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

Acting national security adviser to the President of the United States will be Charles Kupperman — Deputy to John Bolton.

By Nick Baumann in the USA:

“Nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem.” At least that’s what Charles Kupperman, President Donald Trump‘s acting national security adviser, claimed in the 1980s as part of an argument that the United States could prevail in an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Nick Robins-Early broke that story this week for HuffPost, and we asked him about it.

How did this story come about?

We did a story after Kupperman was made acting national security adviser about how he had served on the board of directors for an anti-Muslim think tank. [HuffPost Enterprise Editor] George Zornick suggested that we keep digging into Kupperman’s past. I found that an arms control expert had mentioned months back that Kupperman had some extremely unusual views on nuclear war, then talked with editors about it and we decided to follow up on that angle.

What was the hardest thing about reporting, writing or editing this story?

Finding and verifying the original source of old quotes is always time-consuming, since they usually get twisted or misattributed over the years. I went through a bunch of books and journals quoting Kupperman but without any proper attribution or context. Eventually I found the original interview was done for a book in 1982, but it wasn’t available online or in any stores around town. The library had a copy in their research room, so I had to go through the process of getting that out of their stacks and confirming that he did indeed say those things — plus I ended up finding more horrifying stuff that we didn’t previously know about.

The US Air Force has for the first time tested a ballistic missile that violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in a threat to Russia and China. The Trump administration withdrew from the INF treaty in August as part of its efforts to vastly expand the US arsenal of nuclear weapons and loosen restrictions on their use: here.