Mental Health and Kim Jong Un’s Nuclear Button
by: Jane M. Orient, M.D.
The media is going berserk over an exchange between North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and President Trump about their respective nation’s nuclear arsenals. Yale assistant clinical professor Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., is invoking an “emergency” to justify her long-distance opinionating on President Trump’s mental health. Congressmen are inviting her to testify, in their relentless drive to undo the election and restore business as usual in the Swamp.
What really happened? A belligerent made a threat, and the target promised retaliation. Without diplomatic niceties, President Trump articulated the long-established defense policy of the United States in terms the ordinary person immediately understands. It’s the same principle that works for keeping schoolyard bullies from stealing your lunch.
What next? After the brief war of the words, North Korea and South Korea reactivated a communication line that had been silent for two years, and provocative military exercises are being suspended.
So who is Professor Lee to presume to call President Trump dangerous and unfit? She is a psychiatrist with a 1994 M.D. from Yale who specializes in the study of violence. Her “progressive” credentials appear to be solid. She trains Yale law students to become asylum attorneys, consults with UN agencies, and writes about the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—which is diametrically opposed to the pro-American Trump agenda.
And Trump might revive Ronald Reagan’s dream of defending our homeland. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is even holding a conference on nuclear preparedness.
Is this the real concern of Dr. Lee and her globalist allies? Keeping Americans unprotected against nuclear attack has been a Leftist mission for decades.
The U.S. relies solely on deterrence. This has worked—so far, and is the reason so many nations strive to acquire nuclear weapons. What nuclear-armed state has been invaded, even by the “world’s only superpower”?
But unlike Russia and China, which have a nuclear arsenal and delivery capacity that arguably exceeds that of the U.S., our nation has deliberately forgone the capability of protecting our population from nuclear attack. The ability to save millions of American lives, it is argued, would detract from our policy of Mutual Assured Destruction—appropriately called MAD.
Is MAD an insane policy?
It was Robert McNamara’s idea, not President Trump’s. Every President since John F. Kennedy has acted on it, except Reagan. The 2004 video directed by Steve Bannon, In the Face of Evil, is a paean to Reagan for peacefully bringing down the Soviet empire and ending the Cold War.
The video gives a lot of credit to “Star Wars,” an epithet deployed to mock Reagan’s attempt to “make nuclear weapons obsolete.” The centerpiece of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), however, was not futuristic lasers (though these were researched), but Brilliant Pebbles. These were orbiting kinetic-energy kill vehicles that would destroy ballistic missiles in their boost phase. They were the inspiration of Lowell Wood at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). A replica was displayed at the Great Allentown Fair in Pennsylvania in 1990, along with a mobile steel civil defense shelter display—another Reagan initiative that was aborted by his successors.
Our ability to “hit a bullet with a bullet,” and turn it into hot vapor, obviates the need to use a small nuclear device to compensate for lack of accuracy with explosive power. The U.S. had renounced the nuclear Nike X system, thanks to what Phyllis Schlafly, in 1966, called “Secretary McNamara’s clique of gravediggers.” The Soviets built a nuclear antimissile defense for Moscow. As in the 1960s, Russians are defended, and Americans are not.
The video gives the erroneous impression that we have a sophisticated defense against incoming missiles, but most of the proposal was gutted, and we have only a limited ground-based defense.
So back to those buttons. Can President Trump “push a button and blow up the world”? Actually, no. He has the codes needed to order a launch. But the warheads need to be armed, with an elaborate mechanism to prevent accidental or unauthorized launches. This requires constantly changing codes and the cooperation of at least two persons on the submarine or at the launch site. Does North Korea have such protections? Probably not.
Do our warheads work? Our adversaries had better assume that they do. However, the globalists’ answer to MAD is to strive for the unilateral disarmament of the U.S. Not only has the U.S. arsenal been steadily reduced; the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed in 1996 stopped the underground tests that LLNL used to conduct to assure that our aging weapons still work. Now LLNL pretends to protect us against “climate change,” and we rely on computer simulations, while North Korea does real tests.
Dr. Lee has examined tweets, but not our President—who is not the one launching missiles in the direction of Japan.
What needs examination is the suicidal MAD policy.
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Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. Since 1988, she has been chairman of the Public Health Committee of the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Society. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fourth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
