It was a mistake to visit Los Alamos in the middle of a presidential campaign that Donald Trump might win. I get that now, after wandering around the New Mexico town that is synonymous with clichés like “cautionary tale” and “Pandora’s box” and “be careful what you wish for.”

The shadow over the Manhattan Project — the undeniable feat of scientific brainpower that gave us the nuclear bomb — is apparent nine miles from this haunting town, in a roadside protest sign that quotes Pope Francis speaking five years ago in Hiroshima: “The possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.” It is apparent in a video at the local history museum, as scientists reflect on their work with ambivalence and pride — regretful that Japanese leaders were not offered the chance to see a demonstration of a nuclear bomb and perhaps surrender before two cities were destroyed; thankful that after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death, President Truman followed through with the plan to use the bombs that ended World War II.

Truman could have stopped it. He didn’t, but right afterward he ordered that presidential permission was required for such action, and his administration made it official policy in a 1948 memo: U.S. presidents had the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. If a president gives the word, the military must obey. That’s even if America has not been attacked, and even if a president is demonstrably unfit. A president, for instance, such as Trump, whose reckless, divisive term ended with his loyalists — at his urging — staging a deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election.

“President Trump’s last terrifying weeks in office have been a wake-up call. Never again should we allow a dangerous president to have unilateral control over nuclear launch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry wrote in USA Today shortly after the mob rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump wasn’t the first president to raise such concerns, they said, nor would he be the last. They called for ending “this godlike power” for all presidents to come.

But presidents still have it. And Trump is now trying for a second term in a race most analysts consider too close to call — a prospect so disturbing that this week more than 700 current and former national security officials signed a bipartisan letter endorsing his opponent, asking Americans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because Trump is “impulsive and ill-informed.” Just days earlier, more than 100 former Republican national security officials warned in a similar Harris endorsement that Trump’s erratic nature “threatens reckless and dangerous global consequences.”

A volatile temperament is one of the many reasons Trump is a national security menace. As Hillary Clinton memorably noted in her 2016 convention speech accepting the Democratic nomination: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

Trump has already made America less safe. In his one term, he destroyed three nuclear agreements by unilaterally pulling the U.S. out, and he refused to extend the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (a position President Biden reversed). Historian Lawrence S. Wittner, author of “Confronting the Bomb,” warned in July that “Trump was far less interested in arms control and disarmament than in entering ― and winning ― a new nuclear arms race.”

This was full circle from President Carter’s single term 40 years earlier, in the midst of the Cold War. He signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union in 1979 and told Congress that “every president” since the end of World War II “has sought to reduce the most dangerous elements of the Soviet-American competition.” Three of those presidents were Democrats and three were Republicans. This was a bipartisan project for decades, both before and after Carter.

But President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, and 15 years later came Trump. We need to get back to reducing the risk of nuclear war. However, says author Steve Olson, who wrote about the Manhattan Project’s plutonium reactors in “The Apocalypse Factory,” “that is not going to happen with any Republican administration if Republicans continue on their current path.”

How about sending them on a field trip to Los Alamos? The Bradbury Science Museum there features a short film called “Racing Toward Dawn,” an allusion to the dawn of the atomic era. It recounts the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively.

“The Manhattan Project had unleashed a force never before seen,” the narrator says. “Each strike claimed tens of thousands of lives and left the cities in ruins. The devastation of these attacks, along with the Soviet entry into the war on Aug. 8, compelled the Japanese to surrender.” The war ended on Aug. 14. More than 50 million people had died because of the conflict. And the lab at Los Alamos moved on to improving atomic weapons, described in the film as “refining the nation’s nuclear deterrent.”

What happened at Los Alamos was both a triumph and a tragedy. What’s inarguable is that “nuclear deterrent” is a nerve-racking concept, especially if voters once again hand the “godlike power” to launch a nuclear strike to Donald Trump.

Jill Lawrence is a writer and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” @JillDLawrence

The challenge the United States faces in confronting China on the global stage is “almost overwhelming” and exceeds some of the worst historical crises the country has ever encountered, former Trump administration national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said during an appearance Thursday in Washington.

“I’m not sure America has faced a threat like Communist China in our history,” O’Brien said in a conversation hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

“Maybe the Revolutionary War, when we fought the British who were the leading superpower in the world at the time?” he said. “I think that the threat that we face from China is far more serious than we faced against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.”

O’Brien said he believes China’s ultimate plan is to force the country’s “Marxist-Leninist” ideology on the rest of the world.

“They have an ideology that they believe they can use to organize, to govern the world,” he said. “So it’s a danger to all of us, to our kids and grandkids. It’s a danger to everyone around the world, because they see themselves as being able to govern the entire world based on their ideology.”

Future US-China policy

O’Brien’s remarks come at a time when experts are trying to parse what U.S. relations with China will look like in the next presidential administration, whether it is a second Trump term or a first term for current vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

In a report issued Thursday morning, Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggested that future U.S. policies toward China will likely trend in the same direction regardless of who wins the election.

“U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan is likely to maintain its broad contours under a Harris or a Trump administration,” Lin wrote.”The Harris and Trump teams share the view that China challenges and threatens the established international order, peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States. ‘Managing’ China or ‘winning’ against China will be a top priority for the next U.S. administration, as intense U.S. competition with China will likely continue.”

However, Lin pointed out several areas where a Trump administration might differ, including by implementing harsher trade policies and imposing more far-reaching crackdowns on Chinese influence operations in the U.S.

What is unclear, she said, is the degree to which Trump would continue to nurture some of the Indo-Pacific region alliances that the Biden administration has been working to strengthen, and whether he would continue U.S. support of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own.

In his remarks Thursday, O’Brien touched on all of those subjects.

Not speaking for Trump

O’Brien served in the administration of former President Donald Trump first as a special envoy for hostage affairs, and then as national security adviser from September 2019 until January 2021.

During the 90-minute appearance on Thursday, O’Brien made clear he was not speaking for the former president.

“Anyone who says they’re speaking for Donald Trump, whether it’s on personnel or policy, is not speaking for Donald Trump,” he said. “Donald Trump is going to speak for Donald Trump.”

However, his observations about China might provide some insight into the mindset of people likely to populate a second Trump administration, should the former president win reelection in November.

O’Brien said that a future Trump administration would be focused on signaling American economic, diplomatic and military strength to China and combating what the former president sees as China’s unfair practices. Those include theft of intellectual property, flooding Western economies with Chinese goods subsidized by Beijing, and keeping the value of the Chinese yuan artificially low.

“President Trump has said what he’s going to do,” O’Brien said. “He’s going to raise tariffs on the Chinese and send a strong message that we’re not going to tolerate intellectual property theft any longer. We’re not going to tolerate the dumping, we’re not going to tolerate the currency manipulation, and we’re going to have an incentive for American manufacturers to come home.”

China’s ‘relentless’ aggression

O’Brien said that when he was in the White House, he saw that China is tireless in its effort to expand Beijing’s influence, whether by using its military to harass its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific region or by engaging in espionage and influence operations.

“Every time we fought them somewhere — espionage at a Confucianist institute that we got closed, if it was a cyber intrusion, if it was some sort of military action against our allies — every time you shut that down, they popped up somewhere else. I mean, they operate across every spectrum. They’re in space, they’re in the air, they’re in the sea, they’re on the land,” he said.

“They just operate in every sector. They’re attempting to wear down the free world, and they’ve done a pretty good job of it.”

AK-47s in Taiwan

Earlier this year, O’Brien sparked an angry reaction from Beijing when he suggested arming every military-aged male in Taiwan with an AK-47 in order to resist a potential Chinese invasion.

On Thursday, he repeated the suggestion, saying, “Every military-aged male should have an AK-47 and two [ammunition magazines]. Make sure they’re interoperable so you can get your follow-on ammunition from the patrols that you ambush and kill when they invade your country.”

The object, he said, is to “strike a little fear into the hearts” of China’s leadership. “You may invade, but every time you walk down the street, every window’s going to have an AK-47 pointed out.”

He went on to say that under the first Trump administration, “China did not harass Taiwan the way that they’re doing it now.” He said that under a Harris administration, “You’re not going to see the kind of strength that you get from President Trump that will keep Taiwan free.”

US alliances

O’Brien said that in his view, it is essential that the U.S. continues to cultivate close alliances in the Indo-Pacific region. The “good news,” he said, is that those alliances are strong.

“You take the combination of the ‘Quad’ with India, Australia, the U.S. and Japan; you take the Japan-South Korea-America trilateral alliance; you take a look at AUKUS, with the U.K. and Australia and the U.S.; and the treaty alliances with Thailand and with the Philippines,” he said.

“Those alliances scare the Chinese, because they see us operating together,” he said. “And together, we can contain, and we can push back against the Chinese. When they drive wedges between us, that’s where they get the big advantage.”

Return to nuclear competition

O’Brien said it is becoming increasingly important for the U.S. to revitalize its nuclear “triad” — the combined capacity to launch missiles from air, land and sea — because in addition to the threat the country faces from Russia, China’s nuclear capacity is surging.

“If we don’t take steps soon to both modernize our triad and expand our capabilities, we’re going to be in real trouble, because you have the Russians with 1,250 or 1,500 strategic weapons. They’ve got about another 2,500 tactical nukes that they can deploy. And the Chinese are going to have 1,500 strategic weapons pointed at us, and who knows how many tactical weapons.

“That’s going to be a 2- or 3-to-1 overmatch on us, and that’s not a recipe for deterrence,” he said.

“We’ve got to get back in the nuclear game,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, because we thought that was a day that was gone — that we were past that. But our adversaries have decided that they’re going to still play it. It would be nice to say, ‘Yeah, we don’t want to play that game.’ But we have to have an effective deterrence.”

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday criticized former President Donald Trump’s recent comments about reproductive rights, saying he needs to trust women to make their own decisions.

“I don’t think the women of America need him to say he’s going to protect them,” Harris said during an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, referring to previous comments from Trump. “The women of America need him to trust them.”

Trump said in an all-caps post to Truth Social last week that women “will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be, with the states.”

“I will protect women at a level never seen before,” he said. “They will finally be healthy, hopeful, safe, and secure.”

Asked if Americans can trust her on that front, Harris said “yes.”

“I am not perfect, but I will tell you I’m always going to put the needs of the people first,” she said.

Harris separately pointed to Trump’s previous comments suggesting women should be punished for having abortions.

“Donald Trump is also the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they rightly should be able to make about their own body and their future,” Harris said. “So I think we would all agree that as a result of that perspective that he has about women, he also then chose three members of the United States Supreme Court who did as he intended, undid the protections of Roe v Wade.”

Harris was referring to comments Trump made in 2016 when he said that the “answer is that there has to be some form of punishment, yeah,” when asked about punishing women who broke a theoretical abortion ban.

Later, his campaign said that if abortion were made illegal, “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Harris’ remarks in the interview.

Megan Lebowitz

Megan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.