Photo: Tom Pennington / Getty Images
By: EFE
Tuesday, October 1
A US general took steps to prevent Trump from unleashing a nuclear weapons war
WASHINGTON – The Chief of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley , took action in January in case the then president Donald Trump was attempting to launch a nuclear attack and even contacted China to avoid an armed conflict with that country.
This is indicated by “Peril” (Danger), the new book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, which will go on sale in the United States on 21 of September, but the Washington Post and CNN reported details on Tuesday.
Two days after assault on the Capitol by supporters of Trump , which left five dead on January 6, Milley -the US’s highest ranking general- c summoned the military high command to a secret and extraordinary meeting in his Pentagon office, says the book.
Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone, unless he was also aware, regarding launch military attacks or with nuclear weapons, because he feared that Trump decided to “act on his own”, according to the volume.
The general “was sure that Trump had fallen into a serious mental decline after the elections, and was now practically manic, yelling at officials and constructing his own alternate reality with theories of the endless conspiracy about the elections ”, he adds.
That led the general to press for any serious military decision to go through him, one m edited that also took in 1974 the then US Secretary of Defense, James Schlensinger , as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment in the Senate.
Also, on January 8, the same day as the secret meeting with military leaders, M illey called his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, to try to appease him and ensure that everything was “100% stable ”, despite the assault on the Capitol and Trump’s refusal to accept defeat
His words didn’t seem to convince Li, so Milley recommended postpone some US military exercises in the Pacific and held the meeting with his team to contain any possible order from Trump to launch an attack, points to the book.
It was the second time in the last months of Trump in power that Milley called Li: he also phoned him on 30 October 2020 to assure him that the United States did not plan to attack China, a fear that circulated among the Intelligence China due to rising tensions, reveals the book.
Milley also spoke on January 8 with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who told him that Trump was “crazy” and the general agreed, adds.
The powerful general also feared that Trump could launch a coup after losing the elections, according to another book published in July entitled “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” lo: Donald Trump’s catastrophic final year. , with his lies about the elections, Trump was spreading the “gospel of the Führer”, referring to the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
The new book of Woodward, the prestigious journalist who investigated the Watergate case and who has published two other volumes on the Trump Presidency, also portrays some aspects of the electoral campaign of now president Joe Biden.
Among other things, it reveals that Biden once said about Trump: “He’s not really an American president.”