If one could adjectivize the president, there has never been anything Trumpier than Donald Trump's posture on nuclear weapons. It's an issue where he embraces contradictory thoughts in the same breath with routine. In candidate Trump's debate with Hillary Clinton on September 26, 2016, he said, "I would certainly not do first strike" and "I can't take anything off the table" within the space of seconds. In between, he pulled a Reagan and told a homespun tale on the subject, except his made no sense. "I looked the other night, I was seeing B-52s," he said (where? In his head? On Sixth Avenue?). "They're old enough that your father, your grandfather could be flying them," he added. "We are not keeping up with other countries."

Nukes are the ultimate Trump policy problem because it's a subject that requires scientific knowledge he completely lacks, while also forcing him to choose between two of his most sharply conflicting narcissistic affectations: the deal-making man of peace vs. the "I love war" Lieutenenant Schiesskopf-style missile-humping parade-master.

Remember, candidate Trump ran as a quasi-isolationist who was too smart to waste treasure and lives on pointless regional confrontations in Middle Eastern countries. His first major foreign policy address in April of 2016 was an extended diatribe against post-Cold War interventionism.

In it, he decried military adventures from Syria to Iraq to Libya that unleashed "civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans... killed... many trillions of dollars... lost..." etc. etc.

But Trump, like Americans generally, can't handle even the possibility of people thinking he's a wimp for a second. So even as he ran as an isolationist, an issue that probably won him some key votes -studies showed Trump did well in areas hit hardest by military casualties from our recent dumb wars -he also constantly hyped himself as someone so crazy and unpredictable, he just might use nuclear weapons (as if we needed to be told this!).

Recall Trump telling Face the Nation this, in response to a question by CBS host John Dickerson, about nuke use:

I made a great business deal. And the person on the other side was interviewed by a newspaper. And how did Trump do this? And they said, he's so unpredictable. And I didn't know if he meant it positively or negative. It turned out he meant it positively. We have to be somewhat unpredictable in this whole thing. Nuclear, though, has to be absolute last stance.

The scariest passage in the NPR is meant to clarify a word used with incredible frequency in the massive document: flexibility (I counted 38 usages). After explaining that Russia may feel it has a tactical advantage over the United States because of its greater diversity of nuclear weapons, and in particular its "limited first nuclear use" capability, the NPR explains new technologies are needed.

America will answer in kind, the paper says, by replacing our arsenal with newer and more "flexible" weapons:

To address these types of challenges and preserve deterrence stability, the United States will enhance the flexibility and range of its tailored deterrence options. To be clear, this is not intended to, nor does it enable, "nuclear war-fighting." Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-yield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression.

The Swiss-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the Nobel Prize in 2017 for its work campaigning for the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by the U.N. in July.

The ICAN-lobbied Treaty -similar maybe to the Paris accord, or International treaties on land mines or chemical weapons -would effectively outlaw nuclear weapons and represents the latest thinking of most educated people on the subject, which is that nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable health and safety risk no matter how they're deployed or "modernized."

Certainly pushing a program that involves the mass-construction of "low-yield options" that would create in the mind (or what passes for the mind) of someone like Trump a more "usable" nuclear weapon is pretty much the worst-case scenario.

The reality is that we've been incredibly lucky since 1945 that there haven't been more nuclear disasters. Only the quick thinking of a Soviet army lieutenant in 1983 (after a mistaken launch detection) and half-dead Boris Yeltsin in 1995 (in the so-called "Norweigan rocket incident") prevented global annihilation.

"If you're going to have nuclear weapons forever, they will be used, by accident, intention, or misunderstanding," says Beatrice Fihn, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of ICAN.

Fihn told Rolling Stone that the problem was bad enough before. But now "it's a completely different scenario than when it was just two blocs threatening each other."

Remember, back then, at the height of the Cold War, even the morons who sat in positions of responsibility in both the Pentagon and in the Soviet Union recognized the inherent danger that nuclear weapons posed to humanity. Even people who stood to benefit politically and financially from endless campaigns of weapons development and propaganda about "missile gaps" nonetheless managed to head in the right direction on this issue.

From a high of 60,000-70,000 warheads the two sides managed, through a series of treaties (from ABM to SALT to START to START II), to reduce international stockpiles to somewhere around 15,000 warheads or below.

Which is all well and good, but two problems have emerged of late.

One is this new re-proliferation direction continued (and worsened) by Trump. Barack Obama, too, went from being practically an antinuke activist -he famously called for a "world without nuclear weapons" -to green-lighting a trillion-dollar "modernization" program.

Trump's NPR continues and expands on that idea, and the emphasis on low-yield, Hiroshima-sized weapons that might offer more strategic "flexibility" is exactly the problem.

In 2007, a study by Alan Robock and other scientists in "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" estimated that a "limited" nuclear war involving just 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs could have a devastating effect on the world's food supply.

An updated study published by the Physicians for Social Responsibility concluded that more than two billion people could end up threatened by reduced food stocks after just such a "limited" exchange of "low-yield" weapons (the study posited an exchange of warheads between India and Pakistan). This means that a "regional" war would kill in less than a week more than in all over World War II. Two billion dead from starvation would be a few hundred holocausts. And yet, this is the strategy we're moving toward, not away from.

This is why the situation with Trump, his plans for a more "flexible" arsenal, and moreover his ongoing saber-rattling with North Korea, are so troubling. Donald Trump, guaranteed, is not thinking about what's going to happen to American and Chinese soybean crops if he has to lob a few missiles back and forth with "little Rocket man" Kim Jong-Un.

That's the problem with the embrace of "low-yield" strategies. They assume survivability on one side anyway, but they don't explain what methodology they're using to make these assumptions.

"Who would clean up afterwards?" Fihn asks. "Where would you bury the bodies? If there's a nuclear war over a densely populated area, what do you do with the bodies to prevent infections from spreading?"

The nuclear powers "don't engage on these questions," says Fihn, so no one knows how they're doing the math to bring us back to "flexible" nuclear options.

This is also what made Trump's State of the Union address so hair-raising. A fair portion of it was devoted to making emotional appeals about the evil nature of the North Korea regime, including a gruesome story about the dual amputation/torture of dissident Ji-Seong-ho.

The telling of a horrifying human rights abuse story about a foe by the president is often a precursor to some kind of military action.

Those of us old enough to remember will recall the tale of Iraqi soldiers occupying Kuwait taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die.

The story turned out to have dubious provenance, but George H.W. Bush repeated it in a news conference prior to the first Gulf War. Bill Clinton compared Milosevic to Hitler. George W. Bush ran through a litany of human rights abuses ascribed to former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein prior to the second invasion, citing "beating, burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape."

This is not to say these things weren't or aren't true, just that if you go by the U.S. playbook of military conflict, there is almost always a high-profile human rights abuse accusation that comes shortly before the exchange of hostilities. And as Bob Dreyfuss wrote in this space a few days ago, Trump's saber-rattling with North Korea could easily push us to the one place we can't go -a nuclear exchange.

Trump's new NPR shows that the president and the people around him believe in the usability of nuclear weapons. They're ignorant enough to not have asked questions about what happens after we hit "send" on that one. After all, this is a president who clearly didn't even consider the next steps of winning an election. And we expect him to have plans for how to manage nuclear war? Of all the nightmares of the Trump era, this, Elizabeth, is the big one.

Actually it isn't. In part because we've backed away from anti-proliferation efforts, the Russians have apparently developed a real-life Doomsday Device -the Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6 or "Kanyon" bomb, which is 1,000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb and apparently would be delivered by drone submarine. So that's awesome. Now we get to go back in time to worrying for real about the specter of mutual mass-annihilation, only this time with more devastating weapons.
(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

An Israeli? A Jew? A peace activist? A Journalist? An author? An ex-combat soldier in the Israeli army? An ex-terrorist? A...?

All of these and more.

OK. OK. But in what order? Which is the most important component?

First of all, of course, I am a human being, with all the rights and duties of a human being. That part is easy. At least in theory.

Then I am an Israeli. Then I am a Jew. And so on.

AN AUSTRALIAN man of English extraction would have no trouble answering such a question. He is first and foremost an Australian, and then an Anglo-Saxon. In two world wars he rushed to the aid of Britain, for no practical reason. But in the second war, when his own homeland was suddenly in danger, he rushed back home.

That was quite natural. True, Australia was created mainly by British people (including deported convicts), but the Australian's mental world was formed by the geographical, political and physical environment of Australia. In the course of time, even his (and her) physical appearance changed.

ONCE I had a discussion about this with Ariel Sharon.

I told him that I consider myself an Israeli first, and a Jew only second.

Sharon, who was born in pre-Israel Palestine, retorted heatedly: "I am first of all a Jew, and only then an Israeli!"

This seems an idle discussion. But it has a very practical relevance for our daily life.

For example, is this a "Jewish" state, how can it exist without the dominance of the Jewish religion?

Israel was founded by very secular idealists. Most of them looked upon religion as a relic of the past, a handful of ridiculous superstitions that must be discarded in order to clear the way for a healthy, modern nationalism.

The founding father, Theodor Herzl, whose picture hangs in every Israeli schoolroom, was completely non-religious, not to say anti-religious. In his ground-breaking book, "Der Judenstaat" (The Jewish State), he declared that in the future Zionist state, the rabbis would be kept in the synagogues, without any influence on public affairs.

The rabbis answered in no uncertain terms. They cursed him outright, using the most extreme language. They believed that God Almighty had sent the Jews into exile as a punishment for their sins, and only God Almighty had the right to bring them back by sending the Messiah.

Even the German reform rabbis, a small minority at the time, condemned him. Only a handful of rabbis joined the Zionist movement in the early days.

In Jerusalem, an important group of Orthodox rabbis, who called themselves Neturei Karta ("Guardians of the City"), were openly anti-Zionist. Much later, I often met them in Arafat's office. Other Orthodox rabbis, a bit less radical, insisted on being non-Zionist while still accepting Zionist money. They are now members of the governing coalition.

David Ben-Gurion, the leading Zionist when the State of Israel came into being, despised the religious. He believed that they would disappear by themselves in time. Therefore (and in order to gain the support and money of orthodox Jews abroad) he made all kinds of concessions to them, which allowed the religious community to grow out of all proportion. Now they endanger the very existence of our secular state.

Although representing only about a fifth of Israel's population, the Orthodox of various shades now constitute a powerful force in Israeli politics. From being a moderate force for peace they have turned to a radical nationalism, often a religious fascism. Their influence on daily life is becoming more and more pervasive.

Lately they succeeded in passing a law that forbids the opening of supermarkets on Saturday (Shabbat). The extreme Orthodox wing forbids its sons to serve in the army, demanding that all female soldiers be removed altogether, or at least be prevented from having any contact at all with their male comrades.

Since most Israelis see the army as (perhaps) the only unifying force left in Israel, this results in a perpetual crisis. Other Orthodox wings take the contrary view: they see the army as God's instrument for cleansing all of the Holy Land of non-Jews.

Arab citizens of Israel - more than 20% of the population - do not serve in the army, with some exceptions. How could they be counted on to fulfill the designs of the God of Israel?

If Ben-Gurion and all the dead soldiers of my generation could hear about this situation, they would turn in their graves.

THIS IS only one of the manifestations of the Jewish-first ideology. Another is the question of Israel's place on the region. Jewish-first dictates a quite different outlook than Israeli-first.

I was just 10 years old when my family fled from Nazi Germany to Palestine. On the ship from Marseille to Jaffa I cut myself off completely from the European continent and connected with the Asian one.

I loved it. The sounds, the smells, the environment. I wanted to embrace it all. When at the age of 15 I joined the underground liberation struggle against the British overlords of Palestine, I felt that we were a part of the general struggle of a new world against Western domination.

At the time, a linguistic usage was accepted by all of us, even without noticing. We all started to distinguish between "Jewish", by which we meant the Jews of the Diaspora ("exile Jews" in Zionist terms), and "Hebrew", by which we meant everything local, home-grown.

"Jewish" were the religion, the Ghettos, the Yiddish language, everything over there. Hebrew were we, the renewed language, the new community in our country, the Kibbutzim, everything local. In time, a small group of young intellectuals, nicknamed "Canaanites", went much further and asserted that we Hebrews had nothing in common with the Jews, that we were a new nation altogether, a direct continuation of the Hebrew nation which was dispersed by the Romans some 2000 years ago.

(This picture, by the way, is denied by many non-Jewish historians, who assert that the Romans exiled only the intelligentsia, and that the simple people remained, adopted Islam and are now the Palestinians.)

When the truth about the Holocaust came out, a wave of remorse swept the Hebrew community here. Jewish became the dominant self-definition. Since than, a steady process of re-Judaization of Israel has been in progress.

When the State of Israel was founded, the term "Israeli" replaced the term "Hebrew". The question is now: "Jewish" first or "Israeli" first? It has a direct bearing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Herzl had no problem. He was a convinced Westerner. In his book he wrote the fateful words: "For Europe we would constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we would become an outpost of culture against barbarism." (My translation.)

In other words, the founder of Zionism conceived the future Jewish state as a bastion of European imperialism against the native peoples. More than 120 years ago, the present situation was already envisioned. Zionism has followed this line consistently.

COULD IT have been different? Could we have re-integrated ourselves in the region? I don't know. When I was young, I believed so. I was 22 years old when I founded a group called "Young Eretz-Israel" (and in Arabic and English "Young Palestine") which was generally known - and detested - as the "Struggle-Group", because we published an irregular paper by that name. When Jawaharlal Nehru convened an Asian-African congress in New Delhi, we sent him a congratulatory telegram.

After the 1948 war, I founded a group called "Semitic Action", devoted to the idea of Israel's integration in the "Semitic Region". I chose the term "Semitic" because it included all Arabs and Israelis, by descent and language.

In 1959 I met Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris. He had hesitations about the term, because it sounded racist to him. But I succeeded in convincing him and he published an article I wrote on this subject in his Temps Modernes.

THE MORE "Jewish" Israel becomes, the wider the abyss between it and the Muslim world. The more "Israeli", the higher the chance of an eventual integration in the region, an ideal much more profound than just peace.

Two of the undercover cops that have terrorized poor Black neighborhoods of Baltimore could get up to 60 years in prison following their convictions in federal court on racketeering, conspiracy and robbery charges. Six other former members of the "elite" Gun Trace Task Force await sentencing, having testified to the defendants' and their own crimes against drug dealers, large and small, and anybody else that crossed their predatory paths.

The cops' lawlessness was generalized and routine - part of the job. According to the Baltimore Sun, "Officers routinely violated people's rights in the course of their work with Baltimore's plainclothes police squads - profiling people and vehicles, performing "sneak and peek" searches without warrants, using illegal GPS devices to track suspects they claimed to be watching, and driving at groups of men to provoke them to flee so they could be chased and searched" - dating back to 2010 or earlier. A dozen cops have been directly implicated, but not charged.

Acting police commissioner Darryl De Sousa put out an all-caps bulletin. "Let me make it clear: I have ZERO TOLERANCE for corruption," he wrote, promising that his new corruption unit will probe more deeply into the case.

We can be sure that nothing of lasting value will come out of De Souza's efforts. The root problem is not "corruption" of the police mission, but the mission, itself, which is to control, contain and terrorize the Black community. Baltimore's cops have simply become adept at stealing lots of money in the process.

They are also fearless and shameless, in the knowledge that their true job description is organized terror. Former detective Momodu Gondo, who pleaded guilty to robbing various victims of over $100,000, testified that he didn't fear being caught. "It was just part of the culture," he said.

Such pervasive police predation is no secret to the residents of the targeted neighborhoods, who pleaded in vain for relief from the blue scourge before, during and after Baltimore's 2015 Freddie Gray rebellion. However, the nominally Black-controlled local government is incapable of meaningful response, since the Black political (misleadership) class accepts both its own subordination to the real, corporate rulers of the city, and their role as managers of the system of control, containment and terror.

The president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund expressed the frustration felt by most Black people in Baltimore. "Neither City Hall, BPD's Internal Affairs, nor the State's Attorney's Office was able to uncover and hold accountable the officers at the heart of this criminal conspiracy," said Sherrilyn Ifill. However, Ifill then endorsed the usual formulas for fine-tuning the existing system of oppression. "Residents deserve new procedures, practices, regulations, safety valves, and training across city agencies - including the State's Attorney's office - to ensure that this cannot happen again."

No - what Baltimore's Black residents need is democracy: community control of the hiring, firing and, above all, the mission of the police.

They don't need more Black police. Integrating the ranks of the oppressor's machine is what gave us salt-and-pepper terrorist duos like Daniel T. Hersl and Marcus R. Taylor, the two cops convicted this week. The department's Gun Trace Task Force has been disbanded, along with its related Violent Crime Impact Section, but the white corporate powers-that-be in Baltimore already seem impatient to get their thugs back on the street. A new study by the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University - the city's premier employer and gentrifier - admits the police unit has generated lots of public complaints and lawsuits, but claims it's good for law and order, and that's what counts.

"The reductions in shootings connected with Baltimore's VCIS are consistent with the experiences of other cities that have used specialized police units targeting illegal gun possession in areas with the highest rates of shootings," said Daniel Webster, the center's director and the study's lead author. "But it is important for these programs to be carried out in a manner that is legally justified, professional, and acceptable to the communities they serve with appropriate accountability."

Webster makes the obligatory bow to (non-existent) "accountability," but the purpose of the study is to put forward Johns Hopkins' position on policing in a city largely owned by the university, and which Hopkins hopes to rid of its Black majority as soon as possible. The top dog in Baltimore's permanent ruling circles is demanding that the same hyper-aggressive, neighborhood saturation police tactics that encouraged whole units of cops to behave like warlords, be continued - minus the embarrassing robberies.

When Johns Hopkins says "jump," much of the Black political class says "how high"? - which is what passes for "accountability to the community" in Baltimore. The same groveling relationship to corporate power obtains across Black America. Therefore, in Baltimore and elsewhere, the struggle for Black community control of the police is largely an internal Black political battle.

Progressives should not be cheerleaders for the FBI when it shaves the truth, even if the bureau is now portrayed as Donald Trump's enemy. This is, after all, the FBI infamous for the wiretap of Martin Luther King Jr., the broader COINTELPRO operation, and, recently, smearing antiwar and environmental activists with claims of Russian influence.

Like it or not, that creepy little GOP shill Rep. Devin Nunes is stating a fact when he writes that FBI agents failed to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that the file it used to justify spying on a US citizen, the "Steele dossier," was paid for in part by Hillary Clinton's campaign.

True, the FBI dropped a footnote about the source coming from a "political entity," a fuzzy cover-our-ass comment that failed to state known partisan bias. But failure to tell the court the whole truth and nothing but the truth is perjury.

Ironically, Nunes himself commits the same perjury by failing to name the original creator of the report. Before Clinton paid for a copy, the file was already written for a news front sponsored by a Republican billionaire named Paul Singer.

Singer, the court should have been told, has a long history of creating what former FBI Director James Comey himself called "salacious and unverifiable" files on his enemies.

I know something about this history, because Singer created a file on me. He also created files on elected officials worldwide who got in the way of his next billion. The files consisted of poisonous garbage -- but really effective, deadly garbage.

In 2007, I flew to the Congo and discovered that Singer had seized the funds meant to end a cholera epidemic, which I reported at the top of the BBC news and on the front page of the Guardian. To spike the story, Singer's PR flunky called my BBC "Newsnight" producer and said, "We have a file on Greg Palast." Apparently, it contained the kind of salacious garbage peddled by Steele. The BBC was un-moved, saying, it seems that "Palast has a file on you."

The BBC pressed Singer's flak to turn over the actual dossier. They backed down after admitting it contained old fabricated smears that had been long discredited. (In fact, a US power company had to write me a fat check in punishment for the libel.)

So when I hear that some Trump toady is slimed by a Singer file, I don't clap with joy.

Singer has used secret, poisoned dossiers slipped to media outlets to destroy the reputations of elected officials from Argentina to the Congo -- all to make another billion.

Indeed, his PR flak boasted how he planted stories about the president of the Republic of Congo with the pliant Washington Post. It was part of Singer's campaign to seize $400 million from the Congo to pay off interest and penalties on ancient debts of the war-ravaged nation that Singer had picked up for just $10 million.

Singer has seized millions in Congo assets -- funds that were made available to the Congo by US and European taxpayers to help the Congo clean its water supply and end a cholera epidemic.

The Singer-funded groups in Argentina that smeared former President Cristina Kirchner with allegations of murder, all to get her removed from office. It worked. Despite large public protests, the new president, Mauricio Macri, in his first days in office, paid Singer the billions of dollars Kirchner had refused.

Singer -- a top funder of Marco Rubio's candidacy against Trump and leader of the "Never Trump" campaign -- then decided to use the tricks that succeeded in other countries on our nation.

Let me be clear: Despite Nunes' assertions -- nothing in his memo, none of this FBI misconduct, however unacceptable -- undermines Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump and gang.

Still, I cannot applaud billionaires bending our elections, manipulating -- wittingly or unwittingly -- the FBI.

And I cannot believe my fellow progressives are also cheering the FISA court, the very agency Edward Snowden courageously exposed as the judicial inquisitors blessing an ugly police spy state.

Just one of the thousands of FISA court spy authorizations -- revealed by Snowden -- permitted the National Security Agency to get every single phone call made by Verizon callers, and similar demands were approved to seize the records of every major phone carrier.

The ACLU has been in legal combat with the FISA court over "mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans," allowing use of "Network Investigative Techniques" (i.e. malware), and information collected under the law without a warrant that could be "used to disproportionately target disfavored groups, whether minority communities, political activists, or even journalists."