May 25, 2018
Melissa Hanham
The following is an excerpt from Defense One.
I woke up in foggy coastal California this morning to the sounds of toddlers wanting breakfast, and Twitter. Pre-coffee, pre-shower, and not without trepidation, I lifted my phone to see 20-plus alerts. North Korea had blown their nuclear test tunnels! Trump cancelled the nuclear summit. WTF.
North Korea invited about twenty foreign journalists to witness the destruction of the test tunnels at North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site. After a long dusty journey on plane, train, bus, and foot the journalists reported seeing explosions at Tunnels 2, 3, and 4. Tom Cheshire of Sky News called in to report, “There was a huge explosion. You just could feel it. Dust came at you, the heat came at you. It was extremely loud.
We don’t yet have the footage, because the reporters are without satellite phones or internet access. They are still in North Korea on an even more bizarre trip home next to their North Korean minders who are astonished. Hours after the North Koreans collapsed their test tunnels at the nuclear test site, Trump announced he was jilting their Supreme Leader.
In a winding, childish letter, Trump managed to: one, downgrade Kim Jong Un from Supreme Leader to Chairman in formal communication; two, sound like his feelings got hurt; and, three, invoke God to announce that his nuclear weapons are “so massive and powerful.”
He also reminded Kim that he got three American hostages out of the deal, without mentioning the American reporters currently there, ending with “please do not hesitate to call me or write.” Mmmkay. Did someone’s logistics team get lonely in Singapore? Setting aside visions of Trump staring out the window of the Oval Office on Prom Night, what does it mean?
Continue reading at the Defense One.
