You already know this: Trump is big on posturing. Perhaps when it comes to Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, his posturing is a necessary tactic to quell any notions the megalomaniac – Kim, not Trump this time – has that America, will roll over and play dead.

This is what happened when President Donald Trump received reports of Kim Jong-Un’s success in developing miniature nuclear warheads.

WATCH:

Experts have criticised the president’s remarks as extreme and inflammatory, with little precedence in history (although we know there is precedence, maybe even eerily so). But Trump did not stop there. He went ahead to boast the following day:

My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2017

Now, this is a distortion of the facts.

Not The First Order- or second or third or fifth or … you get the point

Politifact reports that Trump had, indeed, issued a presidential memorandum on “rebuilding the U.S. Armed Forces”, a week after he resumed office. The memo directed the defense secretary to “initiate a new Nuclear Posture Review to ensure that the United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.” The review effort kicked off in April 2017, and according to the Department of Defence, will be completed at the end of the year.

However, this wasn’t Trump’s first order as president. Fact check.org reports that “Trump’s first executive order was on the Affordable Care Act, and the first presidential memorandum was about regulations. Both were issued on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. That first presidential memo was issued by his chief of staff. The first presidential memo signed by Trump came three days later on Jan. 23, and it dealt with abortion.” At least 8 executive orders and memoranda preceded the one on Nuclear Posture Review, going by the information on the White House website.

A Legislative Mandate

More to the point, a request for a Nuclear Posture Review is neither unusual nor unexpected; it is actually “legislatively mandated.” In fact, “after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, all U.S. presidents since Bill Clinton have undertaken Nuclear Posture Reviews, or NPRs, at the beginning of their administrations.” Bill Clinton produced one in 1994. George W. Bush produced one in 2002. The Obama administration’s review, which was completed in April 2010, resulted in a $400 billion modernization plan that includes new nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and Air Force bombers.”

Also, Trump’s declaration is at odds with expert opinion:

“It would be a pretty fantastic claim under even Cold War standards given the size and scope of the arsenal,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former State Department official under Obama. But given the restrictions under the New START treaty that went into force in 2011, it would be “pretty difficult, if not impossible, to achieve except in a crash, well-publicized effort.”

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear-policy specialist who teaches at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, called Trump’s claim “simply false.”

“There is a total of nothing that has changed substantially about the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the few months that Trump has been in office,” Bunn said. “We have the same missiles and bombers, with the same nuclear weapons, that we had before.”

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst who heads the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview that he did not see “how there is any factual basis to support” the president’s tweet.

“Clearly this was not, literally, his first order … and nothing has changed in the nuclear arsenal,” Harrison said. “To be fair, even if he wanted to make changes nothing would have changed by now.”

All Obama’s doing

Currently, the U.S weapons programme is undergoing renovation, after Robert Gates, Obama’s defense secretary, submitted his department’s Nuclear Posture Review on April 6, 2010, calling for ‘much-needed investments to rebuild America’s ageing nuclear infrastructure.'” Based on this report, Obama’s administration went ahead to initiate a decade-long, “ambitious set of programmes to maintain and upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal”, Kingston Reif, director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, said.

This renovation includes “the rebuilding of the Minuteman III system, which launches intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the Trident II submarine-launched missile systems, as well as the refurbishment of nuclear warheads and construction of new and upgraded facilities, such as a uranium processing facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. (Here’s an updated rundown of the modernization plan published by the Arms Control Association.)”

The renovation/modernization effort is also a very expensive one. The Congressional Budget Office February 2017 report peg costs $400 billion between 2017 and 2026 – “or $52 billion more than CBO’s 2015 estimate, “largely because modernization programs will be ramping up.” Cumulatively, total costs could reach $1 trillion over the next 30 years.”

Lastly, most of these programmes are still in their early stages of development so Trump’s boast about a “far stronger, more powerful than ever” nuclear arsenal falls flat. Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, says “The arsenal has just about the same capability today as it did when Trump took office. Same weapons. Same readiness level. Same strike plans.”