US President Donald Trump has downplayed the threat of climate change – and said ‘monster nukes’ from the US and Russia pose the biggest threat to armageddon.
In an interview with Fox News, Trump spoke of the dangers of nuclear stockpiles around the world and lamented the huge amount of money spent on maintaining the ‘big monsters’ that could cause the end of the world.
He said the US and Russia have ‘by far the most’ warheads, but admitted that China could catch up before the end of the decade.
The president told Sunday Morning Futures: ‘I watched Biden for years say the existential threat is from the climate. I said “no”.
‘The greatest is sitting on shelves in various countries called “nuclear weapons” that are big monsters that can blow your heads off for miles and miles and miles.’
‘It’s just bad you have to spend all this money on something that if it’s used, it’s probably the end of the world.’
Last week Trump revealed he is interested in restarting talks with Russia and China to reduce each country’s nuclear stockpile, in the hope of slashing their massive defence budgets.
‘There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,’ he said from the Oval Office.
‘You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons. We’re all spending a lot of money we could be spending on other things actually, hopefully much more productive.
‘One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, “let’s cut our military budget in half.” And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.’
His words come ten days after a now-legendary bust-up with Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, in which Trump accused the Ukrainian president of ‘gambling with World War 3’.
The president also told Iranian leaders to open nuclear talks with the US, and threatened the nation with military action if they did not comply.
In a letter to Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump said he hoped the US and Iran were ‘going to negotiate’ because, if they didn’t, his administration ‘might have to go in militarily’.
He told Fox News, in an interview, which was filmed on Thursday but is due to be televised over the weekend: ‘I’ve written them a letter saying, “I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.”’
Russia currently has the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, with over 5,500 nuclear warheads.
America is the next biggest with 5,044 nuclear weapons, which are located in the US and five other nations: Turkey, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
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