As candidate in 2016, now President Donald J. Trump repeatedly asserted his unwillingness to take nuclear first-use threats “off the table” in any conflict, including with ISIS, or in Europe. (He also said that he would be “the last to use nuclear weapons”—unless, evidently, he were the first.) In the first debate of the presidential campaign, he was asked: “On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing the nation’s long-standing policy [i.e., changing it to no-first-use]. Do you support the current policy?” Given two minutes to answer, Trump said, among other things: “I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over. At the same time, we have to be prepared. I can’t take anything off the table.” In her two minutes, Hillary Clinton managed not to repeat Trump’s words about the table, or to respond to the question at all except to “reassure our allies … that we have mutual defense treaties and we will honor them.” But clearly if she had been pressed, the former secretary of state would have given substantially the same answer as Trump did in all his interviews. Our mutual defense treaties have never excluded U.S. first use of nuclear weapons. (As a candidate in 2008, rebuking Senator Barack Obama for saying he would not use nuclear weapons against Pakistan, she said that no president should ever say what weapons he or she would or would not use.)

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "As candidate in 2016, now President Donald J. Trump repeatedly asserted his unwillingness to take nuclear first-use threats “off the table” in any conflict, including with ISIS, or in Europe. (He also said that he would be “the last to use nuclear weapons”—unless, evidently, he were the first.) In the first debate of the presidential campaign, he was asked: “On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing the nation’s long-standing policy [i.e., changing it to no-first-use]. Do you support the current policy?” Given two minutes to answer, Trump said, among other things: “I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over. At the same time, we have to be prepared. I can’t take anything off the table.” In her two minutes, Hillary Clinton managed not to repeat Trump’s words about the table, or to respond to the question at all except to “reassure our allies … that we have mutual defense treaties and we will honor them.” But clearly if she had been pressed, the former secretary of state would have given substantially the same answer as Trump did in all his interviews. Our mutual defense treaties have never excluded U.S. first use of nuclear weapons. (As a candidate in 2008, rebuking Senator Barack Obama for saying he would not use nuclear weapons against Pakistan, she said that no president should ever say what weapons he or she would or would not use.)" in the context of "Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.