W.J. Hennigan wrote a fairly lengthy piece in Time magazine on the first of February. He writes:

"Since 1993, the Department of Energy has had to be ready to conduct a nuclear test within two to three years if ordered by the President. Late last year, the Trump Administration ordered the department to be ready, for the first time, to conduct a short-notice nuclear test in as little as six months."

This may be because there's some advance in nuclear technology or we've developed a new kind of bomb or we've changed the configuration of our bombs in some way and we need to figure out does this actually work, or how well does this work, or how badass is this particular bomber or whatever it may be. So, when the president orders the test, it has to be done within three years, ideally within two, because that's how long it takes to dig a giant hole in the ground.

When we used to do our tests above ground, John Wayne and many others downwind got cancer, there was just an epidemic of thyroid cancers across the Midwest downwind from the nuclear tests, from the radioactive iodine from the above-ground nuclear tests.

So we do our tests underground and if you're going to do a nuclear test underground, you've got to dig a giant hole, you've got to line it with concrete and stuff, you've got to put all kinds of sensors and instrumentation into it, you've got to set up a telemetry station to monitor the data from those sensors, miles away where people won't be fried or earthquaked out by the nuclear test.

It takes a couple of years to build that kind of infrastructure to do a nuclear test, but Trump is like Mr. Immediate Gratification: "I want it and I want it now."

This is why he so stupidly went to Davos and gave a speech about how wonderful the stock market was. You never brag about the stock market, never take credit for the stock market if you're president of the United States. No one ever has to the best of my knowledge, because every president before Trump was smart enough to realize that in a four-year period odds are the market's not going to continuously go up. It never has. Well, it might have gone up for 4 years, an 8 year period almost never. So instead you just let the good times roll, you don't have to brag about it.

Well, the same thing with nukes.

-Thom

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