From the debate transcript. A few minutes earlier Carson said:
CARSON: “And speaking of that, our Military needs to be upgraded. You know, you look at things like our Ohio Class submarines, they’re 25 years old. Our minuteman 3 missiles — they are 34 years old. Our B-52 bombers — 50 years old. You know, if we don’t get the military right nothing else matters.”
The next time Hewitt got to ask a question, he asked Trump the following:
HEWITT: Mr. Trump, Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out. It’s an executive order. It’s a commander-in-chief decision. What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?
So Hewitt no only used the term “Triad”, he explicitly defined it for Trump. And like I said, Hewitt had told Trump the question would be on the test a couple of weeks ago.
Trump could have given a non-committal answer, like “We have to upgrade all of them.”
Instead, we got this:
TRUMP: Well, first of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible; who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important. And one of the things that I’m frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you’re going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important.
[Side note. No one has found any Trump comments criticizing the Iraq invasion prior to the invasion. His first public comments critical of the invasion were in August 2004, 17 months after the invasion.]
But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out — if we didn’t have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can’t just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn’t care. It was hand-to-hand combat.
The biggest problem this world has today is not President Obama with global warming, which is inconceivable, this is what he’s saying. The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.
HEWITT: Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? I want to go to Senator Rubio after that and ask him.
TRUMP: I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.
Whats your priority among our nuclear triad?
So what? It still was a stupid, showoff, gotcha question to ask a candidate in a debate to discuss the the merits of those three nuclear delivery systems. You can bet there are many disagreements among military experts and officers in the various branches of our armed forces.
A far too specialized, technical and detailed topic for that forum. Hewitt showing his ass and trying to make Trump look bad.
Sounds like the whole damned nuclear triad needs updating. How much will it cost?
>> The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now <<
I think the situation even worse than you seem to suggest, because the Iranians could use one ballistic missile and one nuclear weapon to knock out the USA’s power grid, along with most of our solid-state electronics, by staging an EMP blast in the upper atmosphere. They are well on their way to such a capability.
Such an EMP attack would be the end of our country, with 90% or more of us starving to death, whereas your simple “maniac” or “madman” could probably do no more than level a handful of big cities. We could survive the latter, but not the former.