Donald Trump Doubles Down on Crazy

[PAF]

Featured Articles
by Larry C. Johnson
Jun 17, 2025

Clean up in aisle five. Someone needs to tackle Donald Trump and confiscate his phone. He should not be allowed to post on Truth Social until some adult with a measure of common sense has a chance to review prospective Trump posts. Roughly sixteen million people live in the Tehran metropolitan area. Where would they go? This post by Trump has caused many around the world to take a hard gulp and wonder if Trump is serious. Telegram channels are spinning frantically with claims, non-verified, that the US is going to attack Iran, but the White House has issued a denial. Take that with a hefty grain of salt.

The White House tried to downplay Trump’s remark by claiming that Trump’s post calling for the immediate evacuation of Tehran reflects his desire to urgently bring Iran back to the negotiating table. I’m not sure there is enough lipstick in Washington to cover this pig and make it look beautiful. However, Trump reportedly wants J.D. Vance and Steve Witkoff to meet later this week with Iranian officials… just one more example of the schizoid behavior of Trump. I don’t know about you, but I am growing weary of his clownish behavior.

The chaos in the Trump White House is not confined to the Iran/Israel war. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, made the following announcement around 4 pm Moscow time:

Today, the next meeting within the framework of bilateral consultations on eliminating irritants in order to normalize the activities of diplomatic missions of both countries has been canceled at the initiative of American negotiators. We hope that the pause they took will not be too long.

I think Putin and his foreign policy team understand that Trump is a flake and are responding calmly, at least in public, to Donald’s contradictory words and actions. Russia is still ready to intercede with Iran and Israel in hopes of securing a ceasefire, but the Kremlin first has to figure out what Donald Trump’s policy is — i.e., war or peace.

The irrationality of the West with respect to Iran is illustrated by the following facts:

Iran:

Does not possess nuclear weapons.

• Is a party to the NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons).
  -Allows IAEA inspections.
  -Reports on the movement of enriched uranium.
  -Under constant international pressure and sanctions.
  -Declared a threat – only for the potential possibility of creating nuclear weapons.

Israel:

De facto possesses a nuclear arsenal (estimates: ~80-200 warheads).Did not sign the NPT.
Does not allow international inspectors.
Completely classifies the nuclear program.
Receives support and military assistance from the West.

Declared a “stronghold of democracy” and allegedly a victim.

In other words, Iran, the one country that does not have a nuke and is abiding by international law governing nuclear weapons, is the villain, while Israel, who is flouting those laws, is being treated as the victim. Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaking of making sense, Tucker Carlson had the audacity to point out that Trump’s support of Israel’s war on Iran borders is political suicide for Trump. Instead of thanking Tucker for the warning, Trump attacked Carlson:

Yeah, Tucker should give up his internet platform, which attracts millions of views, and get back on some irrelevant network that only attracts less than a million viewers. Gotta give Trump credit… he has a knack for posting some really stupid tweets.




Reprinted with permission from Sonar21.

Donald Trump Doubles Down on Crazy - The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity

Clean up in aisle five. Someone needs to tackle Donald Trump and confiscate his phone. He should not be allowed to post on Truth Social until some adult with a measure of common sense has a chance to review prospective Trump posts. Roughly sixteen million people live in the Tehran metropolitan...

ronpaulinstitute.org

 

[PAF]

Trump: "Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!

Roughly sixteen million people live in the Tehran metropolitan area. Where would they go?

Indeed. And, what about the Travel Bans?

 

[acptulsa]

I guess this is the face Republicans want America to show the world, because both his campaigns were long series of contradictory promises and somebody voted for him anyway.

Don't know why nobody foresaw that this sort of thing could lead to WWIII. If you stand for nothing Netanyahu can sucker you into anything.

In any case, it seems to be having an effect...

https://rumble.com/v6uxsmr-i-qua-gi-chu-trn-trang-ca-mnh-tng-thng-trump-c-vit-mt-on....html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_m

 

[nikcers]

Peace through strength is rational foreign policy.

Its called speak softly and carry a big stick.

When speaking softly doesn't work you use the big stick.

Diplomacy only works if the alternative to diplomacy is force.

Otherwise you get decades of capitulation and appeasement that leads to more wars.

 

[vita3]

Ironic & tragic that Israel stole Uranium from Pennsylvania Atomic Plant for their Nukes in the 60's..

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-...ranium-us-aid-israels-nuclear-weapons-program

 

[vita3]

The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?​

Document collection and introduction by Roger J. Mattson, PhD

Beginning more than 50 years ago, and extending over the period from 1957 to 1978, according to official U.S. government records and studies, more than 300 kilograms of uranium 235 (U-235) in the form of highly enriched uranium (HEU) went missing from a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant in the small town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) concluded in 1966 that there was about a 200-kilogram deficit between the U-235 in the form of HEU supplied to the plant and the amount returned in products to customers. After the AEC and its Oak Ridge office calculated the processing losses based on NUMEC’s records, they determined that the fate of about 100 kilograms of U-235 in the form of HEU remained unexplained. NUMEC paid for the missing material, but later disputed the AEC calculations, maintaining that the unexplained 100 kgs could be attributed to other processing losses. After decommissioning of the Apollo plant, more than 330 kgs of U-235 in the form of HEU were unaccounted for, with most of that deficit occurring while NUMEC ran the plant.

For decades there have been allegations and suspicions that foreign agents, perhaps aided by American citizens, diverted a significant fraction of NUMEC’s unexplained uranium deficits to Israel for its nuclear-weapons program. Because of the high stakes involved, the affair has been clouded in denial and concealment for nearly a half century. Several recent books and articles, including a book by this Briefing Book’s primary author, Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel, have attempted to account for what is known and what is still a mystery.[1] Using recently declassified documents published today for the first time by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, this Electronic Briefing Book aims to make more widely available to the public the fascinating information that has been declassified so far.

The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, commonly known as NUMEC, owned the Apollo uranium plant. A company named Apollo Industries, headed by Morton Chatkin, Ivan J. Novick and David Lowenthal, invested in NUMEC when it was formed in 1957. Novick later headed the Zionist Organization of America. Lowenthal was an American Zionist who played a significant role in the resettlement of Holocaust survivors in Israel.[2]

One of Lowenthal’s partners in Apollo Industries and the president of NUMEC was Dr. Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, a chemist who played a key role in the development, at Bettis Laboratory, of the reactor that powered the world's first nuclear powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. Shapiro’s work at Bettis Laboratory also involved development of the fuel for the first commercial nuclear power plant at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in western Pennsylvania. Shapiro left Bettis to become the technological force behind the creation of NUMEC, which he founded to invent new and improved methods of processing nuclear fuel. Shapiro, along with a group of his principal managers, conceived, designed, built and oversaw operation of the Apollo plant until the early 1970s. The plant began manufacturing fuel for nuclear reactors in 1959. It processed many tons of uranium in its lifetime, reaching a peak annual throughput of more than 700 metric tons in 1973.

In early 1965, the AEC's Oak Ridge Operations Office in Tennessee conducted a routine inventory of government-owned HEU that the AEC had leased to NUMEC. As the AEC’s Oak Ridge people suspected, based on past concerns, the inventory disclosed a significant shortage. In early 1966, after extensive investigations, with a concerted effort by NUMEC and AEC to account for all conceivable operating losses, the AEC confirmed that 178 kilograms of U-235 in the form of HEU, the main ingredient for uranium-fueled atom bombs, were missing from the Apollo plant. Within three years, the amount had grown to 269 kilograms.

The AEC, and subsequently its successor agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), the General Accounting Office (GAO), the National Security Council (NSC), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives, spanning four presidential administrations, investigated what became of the missing uranium. Despite their efforts, they never fully accounted for it. Those investigations extended over the period from 1965 to the early 1980s. The investigators all acknowledged that the material might have made its way to Israel, and some in high position firmly believed it had gone there, but, until recently, hard evidence of a diversion was veiled in secrecy and hard to find.

Today, more is publicly known about the NUMEC affair than ever before. In 2009 The FBI released a detailed statement that was made in 1980 by a former NUMEC employee who said he started work at Apollo in February 1965 and was fired in October 1978 by the present owner, Babcock and Wilcox, Inc., for job abandonment following an alleged job-related illness. The former employee said he encountered armed strangers on the uranium plant's loading dock one night in early 1965. He said they were loading what appeared to be canisters of HEU onto a truck in racks that he had not seen before. He also saw a shipping manifest that said the material was heading to a ship bound for Israel on the Zim-Israel shipping line. He said that a NUMEC manager later threatened him to keep his mouth shut about what he had seen. From the mid 1980s through 2009, the FBI also declassified some of its other reports from the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Those reports indicated that Zalman Shapiro, throughout the time he headed NUMEC, collaborated with a number of Israeli officials. They included people from the “Science Attaché” office at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., and others from the Israeli intelligence agencies Shin Bet and Mossad, all believed to be part of Israel’s scientific intelligence organization (LAKAM), which collected nuclear technology in the United States to aid Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

In 2014, the Interagency Security Classification Panel (ISCAP) declassified several documents about NUMEC, including voluminous 1978 reports by the NRC and the GAO. Those documents contained both FBI and CIA information regarding NUMEC. In 2015 CIA released another set of documents that appeared to add credence to the claim that in 1968 it found HEU traceable to the United States near the Israeli nuclear complex at Dimona, a fact that former AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg recorded in his diary in June 1978.[3] Furthermore, documents found in 2014 among the personal papers of the late John Hadden, the former CIA Station Chief in Tel Aviv, provide additional insights into what CIA knew about the NUMEC case, Israeli nuclear espionage in the United States, and the Israeli nuclear program generally in the mid to late 1960s. The Hadden documents and the recently declassified CIA documents suggest that some of CIA’s intelligence information was not made available to the FBI and the NRC.

In the end, however, after several FBI investigations, including the use of warrantless wiretaps on Shapiro's phones, the Department of Justice chose not to prosecute him. It is easy to speculate that the Department made this decision because it was unable to use the wiretap information at trial and CIA did not want FBI or Justice to disclose its sources and methods. However, another possibility is that political and foreign policy considerations drove the decision. In 1971, to settle a dispute among the FBI, the Justice Department and the AEC over Shapiro’s security clearance, the AEC commissioners found him a new job at Westinghouse that did not require a security clearance.[4]

The documents described below provide the first in-depth CIA and FBI accounts of NUMEC to reach public view. They contain greater detail about the NUMEC affair than was previously known, leaving strong but not incontrovertible evidence that a diversion did occur. However, the available materials are still highly redacted. In some cases, entire multi-page documents or entire attachments to documents are blanked out. Most of these are CIA records, which the agency claims contain classified information revealing its sources and methods.[5]

There are several new findings contained in the documents recently released. This new information is both material and relevant to understanding what happened at Apollo in the 1960s and what was not publicized during the investigations of the 1970s. Some of the recently declassified documents shed new light on the following issues.