Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon

Anyone can get distracted now and then, and say things out loud he or she probably shouldn’t say.

Perhaps an excited friend lets on about a surprise party, or a co-worker dishes up some unseemly office gossip.

Or, if you’re the president of the United States, you might reveal some numbers about an adversary’s nuclear arsenal and then admit that those weapons, even a relatively small number of them, are pretty darn useful.

Donald Trump made this impromptu foray into nuclear-deterrence issues yesterday when he was inspecting the destruction he’s inflicted on the White House East Wing.

A reporter asked whether he was again exchanging letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a reference to the president’s earlier epistolary bromance with Pyongyang’s dictator.

“I can’t tell you that,” Trump responded.

“But I get along with him.

And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing.

Not a bad thing.” It’s not always a “good thing” to “get along with” a murderous autocrat who runs a country that is functionally a prison camp, especially one with a nuclear arsenal.

The size of that arsenal is a tightly held secret in Pyongyang, but it is not inconsequential: Experts working from open sources have made various guesses , usually in the range of roughly 60 thermonuclear weapons. [ Tom Nichols: Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation ] Trump, however, blurted out an exact tally.

“He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” the president said.

That’s a pretty specific number; the intelligence community almost never issues such precise figures, instead offering ranges of plausible guesses.

Trump may be making it up out of nowhere, or perhaps talking about some subset of Pyongyang’s arsenal, as the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis suggested, or he’s garbling something he saw in a classified setting and didn’t understand.

In the end, Lewis mused in a series of posts on social media, “Trump is trying to tell us a secret he heard, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it means.” Clearly, Trump has been getting briefed on developments about the North Korean nuclear inventory.