Journalist Bob Woodward's explosive new book on Donald Trump has sparked a frenzy of activity among the world's nuclear weapons experts, with the US president citing a new weapon "
that no one else has
."
According to excerpts from the book
Rage
published by the
Washington Post
, Mr. Trump bragged during one of the 18 interviews he gave between December 2019 and July 2020 to Bob Woodward, to have a new weapon which neither the president Russian Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi Jinping are unaware.
To read also: Bob Woodward: the White House, "a mad world"
"
I built a nucleus (system) ... a weapon, I built a weapon system, weapon systems, that no one else has ever had in this country,
" says the president American, seeming to recover, according to these extracts dated December 5, 2019. "
We have things that you have never seen, that you have never heard of,
" adds Mr. Trump.
“
We have things that Putin and Xi have never heard of.
No one.
What we have is amazing.
"
Bob Woodward, made famous for revealing the Watergate scandal in the 1970s with Carl Bernstein, indicates in his book that unidentified sources have confirmed that the US military has a "
new secret weapon
".
But they did not tell him what kind of weapon it was and said they were surprised that Mr. Trump had mentioned it.
Experts dissected these few sentences to try to guess which weapon Donald Trump was talking about.
Did the American president correct himself because the weapon is in fact not nuclear, or precisely because it is and he realized that he was talking too much?
New hypersonic missile?
Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists said on Twitter that "it
was in fact the low-power W76-2 nuclear warhead which was then developed and has since been deployed
."
The Pentagon announced on February 4 that it had deployed for the first time this nuclear weapon which has an explosive charge estimated at 5 kilotons (three times less than the Hiroshima bomb) aboard the submarine USS Tennessee, which patrolled the Atlantic.
But for Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute, it is the new hypersonic missile that the United States is developing.
"
Trump's way of speaking in December 2019 is similar to his March 2020 boasting about the 'super extra' missile that turned out to be the hypersonic,
" he tweeted.
To read also: Bob Woodward: “Nixon should never have been president”
Asked on Fox News, the National Security adviser of the White House, Robert O'Brien, assured that the American president was not talking about a weapon in particular.
“
We're always on the cutting edge of technology and we always have something that our opponents aren't aware of,
” he said.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Carver has refrained from commenting "
on a book that has not yet been published
."