This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 4th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The task of understanding President-elect Donald Trump's pronouncements about nuclear weapons poses a big challenge

for policy makers and foreign governments. Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense and

Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute discusses the possible meanings.

We're now in an era of American politics where we figure out what our nuclear weapons policy is going to be by reading tweets that the president-elect

could not be bothered to proofread.

Typo-laden Trump tweets about nukes created this controversy or at least a lot of

news in the week before Christmas when Donald Trump tweeted first, quote,

the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability

until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.

Everyone immediately began wondering what that meant,

because he didn't just say strengthen,

he said expand,

and why do you need to say expand if you're already strengthening?

Does expand mean build more?

Does that then mean that we have to violate the New START treaty that's been in place

since 2010 restraining the number of systems the United States has to deliver nuclear weapons,

or does it mean that we're going back on our pledge in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the NPT, to work towards the ultimate goal

of disarmament.

So we created a lot of consternation, and then President-elect Trump's spokesperson at the time,

Jason Miller, put out a statement saying, well, Trump was really just talking about his concern about the threat of proliferation

...