US President Donald Trump has claimed to have developed a secret new weapons system, possibly a nuclear one. It is one of the explosive discoveries from journalist Bob Woodward’s new book on Donald Trump. The above claim extracted from one of the many interviews Trump gave Woodward for the upcoming book, Rage. It says President Trump has pulled the US out of several arms control treaties. He discussed the threat from North Korea in the first year of his term and the extent to which the US was braced for a nuclear confrontation. The Washington Post reported that it is where he boasted of the new development.
Woodward quotes the President telling him, “I have built a nuclear, a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody what we have is incredible”. It is still unclear whether Trump specifically meant a new nuclear system. But, Woodward apparently did independently confirm that a new weapons system exists. The reaction from weapons control experts has been mixed in the absence of any further detail. Most of them have pointed out that given Trump’s tendency toward hyperbole. It is quite possible he was alluding to either a minor development to existing technology.
The co-director of the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program, James Action also speculated that given the timing of the discussion Woodward describes Trump might have been referring to the new lower-yield warheads fitted to Trident D5 missiles that were announced in 2018 and first deployed at the end of 2019. It is noteworthy that the timing of the first deployment having been classified. James Action said, “I don’t believe that the US could build an actually new nuclear weapon in secret. Too much money for classified budgets. Too many people involved for it not to leak”. A nuclear weapons expert at the Harvard Extension School, Andrew Facini said Woodward had confirmed that whatever Trump referred to did in fact exist, it was probably either something mundane they told Trump was awesome in order to sell it.