President Trump when asked
what he meant when he said, “We’ll see” in response to a question about
potentially attacking North Korea over its nuclear tests.Credit
Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The
broad debate over President Trump’s fitness for the difficult and
demanding office he holds has recently been reframed in a more pointed
and urgent way: Does he understand, and can he responsibly manage, the
most destructive nuclear arsenal on earth?
The
question arises for several reasons. He has threatened to “totally
destroy” North Korea. He has reportedly pressed for a massive buildup in
the American nuclear arsenal, which already contains too many — 4,000 —
warheads. And soon he will decide whether to sustain or set a course to
possibly unravel the immensely important Iran nuclear deal.
Doubts about his competency were reinforced this week by Senator Bob Corker,
who charged that Mr. Trump was treating his office like “a reality
show” with reckless threats that could set the nation “on the path to
World War III.” Mr. Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, says he is
relying on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis and John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, to help “separate
our country from chaos.” That is a searing indictment, and Mr. Corker
is no garden-variety legislator; as chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, he is a respected, and largely responsible, voice
on national security issues.
Further, NBC News now reports
that Mr. Tillerson judged Mr. Trump a “moron” after a July 20 meeting
in which Mr. Trump, apparently distressed that the arsenal has declined
since the Cold War, said he wanted a nearly tenfold increase in weapons.
Mr.
Trump’s policy pronouncements during the campaign betrayed either
profound ignorance or dangerous nonchalance: At one point he wondered
why America had nuclear weapons if it didn’t use them; at another he
suggested that Japan and South Korea, which have long lived under the
American security umbrella, should develop their own nuclear weapons.
But nothing he said has been quite as unsettling as his recent
tweetstorms about North Korea, his warnings of “fire and fury” and his quip about “the calm before the storm.”
President Trump believes the U.S. needs more weapons, but
its current stockpile of 4,000 could decimate much of the planet.
Each bomb
equals five
warheads
A New York Times analysis found the U.S. could
use 1,103 nuclear warheads and decimate China, Russia, North Korea,
Iran, Libya, Iraq, and Syria...
... and still have 2,897 left.
Many
have hoped, and still hope, that Mr. Trump’s aggressive posture is
mostly theater, designed to slake his thirst for attention, keep
adversaries off guard and force changes in their behavior by words
alone. But there is no underlying strategy to his loose talk, and
whatever he means by it, Congress has been sufficiently alarmed to
consider legislation that would bar the president from launching a first
nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress. It wouldn’t
take away the president’s ability to defend the country.
That’s
a sound idea, and could be made stronger with a requirement that the
secretaries of defense and state also approve any such decision. As
things stand now, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed when there was
more concern about trigger-happy generals than elected civilian leaders,
gives the president sole control. He could unleash the apocalyptic
force of the American nuclear arsenal by his word alone, and within
minutes.
A version of this editorial appears in print on October 12, 2017, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: One Finger on the Button Is Too Few. Today's Paper|Subscribe
During the 2016 campaigns,
Russian agents harvested posts and videos from Americans and used them
on social media to sow division. Here supporters cheered a year ago for
then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
All
of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended
up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy
Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the
Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching
Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election.
A
New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of
the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American
politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans
were broadcasting across social media platforms.
The
Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders”
and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one
conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur
from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police
beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them,
sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.
Other
posts on the Russian pages used stilted language or phrases rarely
found in American English. Yet their use of borrowed ideas and arguments
from Americans, which were already resonating among conservatives and
liberals, demonstrated a deft understanding of the political terrain.
The Russians also paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of
American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate
most widely, and among which audiences.
“This is cultural hacking,” said Jonathan Albright,
research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital
Journalism. “They are using systems that were already set up by these
platforms to increase engagement. They’re feeding outrage — and it’s
easy to do, because outrage and emotion is how people share.”
All
of the pages were shut down by Facebook in recent weeks, as the company
conducts an internal review of Russian penetration of its social
network. But content and engagement metrics for hundreds of posts were
captured by CrowdTangle, a common social analytics tool, and gathered by Mr. Albright.
Photo
Videos made by an American
YouTube channel called CleanTV.com were reposted by a Russia-linked
Facebook page called Secured Borders.
One
Russian Facebook page, the United Muslims of America, frequently posted
content highlighting discrimination against Muslims. In June 2016, it
posted a video originally made by Waqas Shah, 23, an online video
creator from Staten Island. In the video, Mr. Shah dressed in a thobe, a
traditional ankle-length gown worn by Arab men, walked through New
York’s Union Square, where he is shoved and harassed by another actor
pretending to be a bully to see how bystanders react.
The
video ends with Mr. Shah pointing out New York’s hypocrisy: The city
claims to be a “melting pot,” but no one intervened while he was getting
harassed. Mr. Shah’s original video, posted on YouTube in June 2016,
was a viral hit that attracted more than three million views. A week
after he posted it, United Muslims of America copied the video to its
group page without the original YouTube link, a process known as
ripping. There, Mr. Shah’s video become the Russian page’s most popular
post, earning more than 150,000 interactions.
Mr.
Shah said when he noticed the ripped video, he wrote to the
administrator of the United Muslims account, asking them to add the link
to his original YouTube video. His main concern, Mr. Shah said, was
that the page was stealing his views. Told that his video had been used
by Russian accounts to sow division in the United States, Mr. Shah said
there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
“There are always going to be people who manipulate things to their agenda,” he said.
When
Being Patriotic posted a brief message last year rallying Americans
against proposals to expand refugee settlements in the United States, it
was liked, shared or otherwise engaged with by more than 750,000
Facebook users. Eventually, it came across the feed of Len Swanson, 64, a
Republican activist from Houston and an avid Trump supporter.
“I
usually publish an article several times a week, to keep driving the
narrative,” Mr. Swanson said in an interview. He was not bothered, he
said, by becoming an unwitting cog in the Russian propaganda machine.
“You know we do the same damn thing over there,” Mr. Swanson said. “What
do you think — we’re saints?”
In early 2016, Being Patriotic copied and pasted a story from the conspiracy site
InfoWars, saying that federal employees had taken “land from private
property owners at pennies on the dollar.” The Russian page added some
original text: “The nation can’t trust the federal government anymore.
What a disgrace!”
Photo
A Russia-linked Facebook
page, Being Patriotic, posted a version of a message rallying Americans
against proposals to expand refugee settlements in the United States.
The message was reposted by American Facebook users.
This
past March, another of the Russian pages, Secured Borders, reposted a
video that it attributed to Conservative Tribune, part of the
conservative and pro-Trump sites run by Patrick Brown. The video, which
falsely claims that Michigan allows Muslim immigrants to collect welfare
checks and other benefits for four wives, originated on a YouTube channel called CleanTV. The Facebook post has been removed, but a version remains up on the meme site Me.Me.
Mr. Brown did not respond to an email seeking comment. But Gerald McGlothlin, the president of CleanTV — and a contributor to other sites run by Mr. Brown — confirmed in an email that his company had created the original YouTube video.
The Blacktivist Facebook page appears to have specialized in passionate denunciations of the criminal justice system and viral videos
of police violence, many of them gathered from Facebook and YouTube. In
May, Blacktivist also posted a message drawn from news stories about the death of Jayson Negron,
a teenager in Bridgeport, Conn., during a confrontation with police.
Such posts soon found an authentic audience: The Negron post was
reposted by a verified Facebook account belonging to Black Lives Matter
Chicago, according to a cached copy.
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As
lawmakers debate tighter regulation for companies like Facebook, the
trail of Russian digital bread crumbs underscores how difficult it will
be to purge social media networks of foreign influence, or even to
hamper the covert propaganda campaigns carried out on social platforms
by Russia, China and other countries.
Copying
other people’s content without proper attribution can be a violation of
the social networks’ rules. But the content itself — the videos, posts
and Instagram memes borrowed and shared on the Russian pages — are not
explicitly violent or discriminatory, so they do not violate the rules
of those services. Instead, they are precisely the type of engaging
content these platforms are hungry for.
The
Russian campaign also appears to have been tailored to exploit the
companies’ own strategies for keeping users engaged. Facebook, for
example, pushed people to interact more in Groups like the ones set up
by the Russians, where users can “share their common interests and
express their opinion” around a common cause. LinkedIn, the professional
social network owned by Microsoft, is geared toward encouraging users
like Mr. Swanson to create articles and other content.
“The
strategies are no mystery,” said Michael Strangelove, a lecturer on
internet culture at the University of Ottawa. “Foreign powers are
playing within the rules of the game that we wrote.”
Photo
Facebook has now shuttered
the pages linked to Russia. The social network, whose Los Angeles
offices are shown here, is conducting an internal review.Credit
Rex Features/Associated Press Images
A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment. LinkedIn said Mr. Swanson’s post did not violate the site’s terms of service.
“The
challenges posed by the dissemination of fake news and other harmful
content through technology platforms are serious,” said Nicole Leverich,
a spokeswoman for LinkedIn. “We actively address suspected violations
of LinkedIn’s terms of service such as harassment, fake profiles, and
misinformation on our platform.”
The
Russians appear to have insinuated themselves across American social
media platforms and used the same promotional tools that people employ
to share cat videos, airline complaints and personal rants. Many of the
posts on Being Patriotic also match pre-made, shareable graphics on
sites like ConservativeMemes.com, nestled alongside other conservative
content made for sharing on social media.
Boosted
by Russian accounts, the material was quickly picked up by other
American users of Facebook, spreading the posts to an even bigger
audience. The Russian presence appeared to be layered throughout
different platforms: Some of the Facebook accounts, including Being
Patriotic, had linked accounts on Instagram and Twitter, according to
deleted content captured in Google’s cache.
John
W. Kelly, the founder of Graphika, a commercial analytics company in
New York, said the Russians appeared to have a consistent strategy
across different platforms. Graphika has tracked thousands of social
media accounts whose content closely tracks Russian information
operations, promoting articles and videos about WikiLeaks dumps of
stolen emails and “false flag” conspiracies about Syrian chemical
weapons.
The
Russian accounts intermingle with real groups of Facebook or Twitter
users — from white nationalists to Bernie Sanders supporters — and seek
to manipulate and radicalize them, Mr. Kelly said.
The
Russian-influenced networks frequently promote obscure conservative
YouTube channels such as the Next News Network and the Trump Breaking
News Network, driving up their views and advertising revenue. A video
posted in February by a conservative internet radio host, who claimed that 30 politicians
were about to be arrested in connection with the “Pizzagate” hoax,
racked up more than 300,000 views on YouTube. Another YouTube video, claiming that Michelle Obama had 214 personal assistants and had purchased four yachts with taxpayer money, had close to a million views.
Rather
than construct fake grass-roots support behind their ideas — the public
relations strategy known as “Astroturfing” — the Russians sought to
cultivate and influence real political movements, Mr. Kelly said.
“It
isn’t Astroturfing — they’re throwing seeds and fertilizer onto social
media,” said Mr. Kelly. “You want to grow it, and infiltrate it so you
can shape it a little bit.”
Nick Confessore reported
from New York and Daisuke Wakabayashi from San Francisco. Scott Shane
contributed reporting from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Russians Spun American Rage Into a Weapon. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Last week, Hurricane Maria made landfall in
Puerto Rico with winds of 155 miles an hour, leaving the United States
commonwealth on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. The storm left 80
percent of crop value destroyed, 60 percent of the island without water
and almost the entire island without power, as seen in the nighttime
satellite images below.
July 24
Sept. 25, 5 days after landfall
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |
Note: Some areas of western central Puerto Rico were partially obscured
by clouds on Sept. 25.
From left, DigitalGlobe via Google Earth; Ricardo Arduengo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Toa Alta
Though Hurricane Maria had dropped from a
Category 5 to a Category 4 storm by the time it reached Puerto Rico, it
was more than powerful enough to rip apart roads and strip trees as it
cut a path across the island.
The Guajataca dam in northwestern Puerto Rico
sustained structural damage, resulting in flash flood warnings for the
nearby municipalities of Isabela and Quebradillas. The governor said
that nearly 70,000 people could be affected if the dam were to collapse.
Before
After
From left, DigitalGlobe via Google Earth; Alvin Baez/Reuters
Barranquitas
The mountain municipality of Barranquitas in the
central region of Puerto Rico has been rendered nearly inaccessible
after landslides effectively sealed the area off from conventional means
of travel. Across the island, roads were left strewn with debris.
Ricardo Arduengo/Agence France-Presse
Toa Baja
More than 2,000 people were rescued from Toa Baja, one of the hardest hit towns,
as the storm surge swept residents away and neighborhoods went
underwater. The town’s mayor, Bernardo Márquez, said at least eight
people drowned because of the flooding.
Before
After
From left, DigitalGlobe via Google Earth; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The New York Times | Source: VÃctor Cruz-Atienza, National University of Mexico
The earthquake that on Tuesday killed at least
135 people in Mexico City and toppled dozens of buildings there was all
the more destructive because of the city’s unusual position atop an
ancient lake bed.
The animation above, based on a model by VÃctor Cruz-Atienza,
a professor of geophysics at the National University of Mexico, shows
how the shock waves of a hypothetical earthquake near Mexico City would
spread. Darker red areas indicate the strongest ground movement.
The shaking in this simulation is strongest in
the low parts of the Valley of Mexico, which cradles the city, and it
weakens when it meets the surrounding hills. That’s no coincidence. The
darker red areas showing the strongest shock waves trace the shape of an
ancient lake.
Advertisement
The Spanish built modern Mexico City over the
ruins of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which they conquered in
1521. The Aztec city was on an island in Lake Texcoco, but the Spanish
drained the surrounding lake over centuries and expanded Mexico City
onto the new land.
Today, much of the city stands on layers of sand
and clay — up to 100 yards deep — that used to be under the lake. These
soft, water-laden sediments make the city uniquely vulnerable to
earthquakes and other problems.
2 MI.
The city stands on soft
ancient lake sediments.
The lake bed
contains some hills...
...and is surrounded
by mountains.
1 MILE
ABOVE SEA
LEVEL
HARDER ROCK
The New York Times
During an earthquake, the looser sediments near
the surface cause shockwaves to slow down from about one and a half
miles per second to about 150 feet per second as they enter the valley.
The slower waves grow in amplitude, similar to a tsunami approaching a
coastline, and cause more violent shaking.
Worse still, the denser, deeper material below
the looser sediments causes waves to linger in the valley, making the
amplified shaking last longer.
The map below, based on seismological readings
taken at the National University of Mexico, shows how violently the
ground shook in Mexico City during Tuesday’s earthquake. Like the
simulation map, the redder the area, the more violently the ground shook.
MEXICO CITY
Lake bed
Strength of shaking in Mexico City
The New York Times | Source: The Institute of Engineering at the National University of Mexico
These actual readings confirm what the
simulation shows: Tuesday’s earthquake grew worse in the city as its
waves moved through the ancient lake bed below.
Mexico City is already a hot spot for
earthquakes because vast chunks of the earth’s crust, called tectonic
plates, are slowly smashing into one another nearby. Mexico rests on the
North American Plate, and the Cocos Plate slides underneath it along
the country’s southwestern coast.
MEXICO
200 MILES
Mexico City
TUESDAY’S EPICENTER
COCOS PLATE
The collision as one plate plunges below the
other, a movement called subduction, releases huge amounts of energy,
making earthquakes a common occurrence in Mexico. Unlike Tuesday’s, many
of these earthquakes are small.
The unique geology of Mexico City’s basin can
amplify earthquake waves to be a hundred times stronger than they would
be otherwise, a phenomenon that Dr. Cruz-Atienza said is not matched
anywhere else in the world.
Partly because of this amplification,
earthquakes that happen relatively far away from Mexico City can still
cause significant damage. A devastating earthquake in 1985 that killed
as many as 10,000 people originated over 200 miles away, near the
Pacific coast of Mexico.
The epicenter of Tuesday's quake was closer,
around 50 miles away, but the map below shows that it shook Mexico City
more violently than other areas that were a similar distance from the
epicenter.
Mexico City
Puebla
Atlixco
EPICENTER
20 MILES
The New York Times | Source: United States Geological Survey
The 1985 earthquake prompted improvements to building codes that are thought to have lessened
the damage on Tuesday. But earthquakes will always pose a unique threat
to Mexico City, because of the geologic implications of the ancient
lake bed that lies beneath it.
Hundreds of thousands of people celebrated the Catalan National Day on Monday in Barcelona.Credit
David Ramos/Getty Images
BARCELONA,
Spain — Hundreds of thousands of Catalans took over the center of
Barcelona on Monday to mark their national day and raise the pressure on
the Spanish government in Madrid before an independence referendum planned for Oct. 1.
The
referendum has been declared illegal by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy
and suspended by the Spanish judiciary as a violation of Spain’s
constitution. But separatist leaders in the Catalan regional government
have vowed to go ahead with it, even if they risk prosecution for civil disobedience.
Protesters carrying
“esteladas” or Catalan flags and other nationalist symbols in support of
an Oct. 1 referendum on independence.Credit
Santi Palacios/Associated Press
Since 2012, the Diada, or Catalan national day, has been turned into the annual show of force of independence-minded Catalans.
On
Monday, the protesters filled two streets of Barcelona to form a “plus”
sign, representing citizens joining forces. Some demonstrators said the
cross symbolized the mark they will put on their ballots in favor of
independence, assuming the referendum goes ahead.
Men wearing of Catalan military costumes from the 18th century performed during the rally.Credit
Santi Palacios/Associated Press
Many
demonstrators insisted that they would also step up their protests if
the result of the vote did not then become binding — as their separatist
leaders have promised it would be.
“Civil
disobedience is sadly sometimes the only way,” said Manel Angurem, an
international trade consultant who drove for about an hour with his wife
and three children to Barcelona to attend the demonstration. “If it
weren’t for civil disobedience in the United States, black people
wouldn’t have managed to get a seat on the same bus as white people.”
Still,
as in previous years, Monday’s protest was a festive and peaceful
occasion, with some participants even forming the traditional Catalan
castells, or human towers.
Performers built a human tower during the demonstration.Credit
Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press
Catalans
feel strongly about their distinct language, history and culture. But
such feelings have become entwined in recent years with other issues,
including how much tax revenue Catalonia should redistribute to poorer
parts of Spain.
In
addition to history, many of the participants cited pocketbook issues
in wanting independence, after a financial crisis that helped fuel
separatism in Catalonia.
“If
we look after our own wealth rather than hand it over to Madrid, I’m
sure independence will also bring us better economic conditions,” said
Laura Solsona, who has a beauty salon in the town of Sabadell and had
painted “Yes” on her forehead and a Catalan flag on her cheek.
Carles
Puigdemont, the leader of Catalonia, assured the region’s voters that
the independence referendum would take place, despite efforts by the
Madrid government and Spanish courts to block it.
Catalan
citizens “will vote, as they have always done in complete normality,”
Mr. Puigdemont said. A referendum, he argued, would not escalate the
secessionist conflict because “the ballot boxes don’t divide, they
unite.”
The leader of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, attended a ceremony to mark the occasion.Credit
Toni Albir/European Pressphoto Agency
The demonstrators held a minute’s silence in honor of the victims of the terrorist attacks last month in Catalonia
that killed 16 people, most of them mowed down by a van driver on
Barcelona’s most famous promenade. Few in the crowds on Monday seemed
concerned about security.
“We’ve
always shown respect, and we now hope that we can convince others to
respect our right to vote and become another normal European state,”
said Jesús Ribera, a trade union official, who had a sticker on his
sleeve showing Catalonia as a future member state of the European Union.
“I
can assure you that all the people here today will be standing in front
of the polling stations on Oct. 1, even if they are kept closed and
Madrid also manages to seize the ballot papers and boxes.”
In addition to hundreds of thousands of protesters, many other independence supporters watched the march.Credit
Susana Vera/Reuters
As the political clock ticks toward the Oct. 1 deadline for the referendum, the tension between Madrid and Barcelona is rising.
Prime Minister Rajoy is even weighing whether to take emergency
measures to stop the vote, a step many fear would deepen the standoff.
Even
the crowd estimates were disputed on Monday. Local police put the
number at about one million, while representatives from the central
government in Barcelona estimated it at between 300,000 and 350,000.
July 24
Sept. 25, 5 days after landfall
Before
After
Before
After
Before
After
