US President Donald Trump revealed in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward that the U.S. allegedly has a secret nuclear weapon unknown until now.
The Washington Post media released some audios with an interview that has not yet been published.
“I have built a nuclear weapons system that nobody has had before in this country. We have things that you have not even heard of or seen. We have things that [Vladimir] Putin and Xi [Jinping] have never heard of before. There is no one, what we have is incredible,” Trump said.
For their part, Woodward’s sources said Trump was talking about a real system, and they were surprised he did. With this, they did not offer any specific information in this regard.
The American president is known for his tendency to openly discuss sensitive topics, even in public, which is why these latest comments are not particularly new.
At the same time, it is also known that Trump does not always seem to have a firm understanding of the issues discussed, which leads him to make false statements on certain weapons systems and capabilities, highlights The Drive.
An example of this was the case of the “super missile“, which he referred to while speaking to journalists during an event at the White House in May 2020. He claimed that this weapon was “17 times faster than the one they have now [China and Russia]”. As it turned out, it was a hypersonic vehicle with a top speed of Mach 17 developed by the US military, which was previously publicly announced by the Pentagon.
When it comes to nuclear weapons and many of its carrier systems, they are among the most secret systems in the United States military arsenal, even if their existence is publicly known. Their exact capabilities are typically not disclosed to prevent opponents from developing countermeasures that could limit the usefulness of America’s nuclear deterrents.
On the one hand, it is possible that Trump was talking about known weapons, but whose benefits are kept secrets, such as the W93 nuclear warheads, the B-21 Raider bombers that could operate nuclear weapons or the new US land-based intercontinental ballistic missile system known as Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD).
On the other hand, Trump could be referring to something much more exotic that does not currently exist in the public domain in any concrete way. It remains to be seen if any new details about the weapon system that Trump mentioned to Woodward will emerge now that the interview is in the public domain, but “someone will surely pressure Trump to move forward,” the sources conclude.