WASHINGTON D.C. – Calling it a ‘paramount achievement in modern engineering’, a small team of computer scientists and engineers announced on Thursday that the United States’ Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, designed to defend against nuclear missiles, now also boasts a very special and powerful feature: the ability to delete Tweets at a dizzily fast speed.

“Essentially, the nuclear ICBM threat is real and complex. We need everything we can get on our side. In order to better handle real-world threat neutralization events, the implementation of a real-time connection to Twitter was an absolutely requirement in the upgraded design matrix,” Said Robert Elliot, head of engineering.

For many months, military strategists and engineers alike have recognized that while the THAAD system is fully capable of shooting down long-range, nuclear capable missiles at speeds of up to mach 80, the most effective and safe way to ensure that the system works to it’s fullest ability is to prevent the adversary from firing the threat in the first place.

“Basically, these hardware defense systems work well, but nothing is ever a perfect stage. In our tests, we found that deleting Tweets that our president sends is 100% effective in preventing a nuclear annihilation, as opposed to 95% when using the missile defense network,” Elliot stated.

How does such a complex system work?

“Well, despite the overall THAAD paradigm costing something like $56.7 trillion, ultimately a small team of our engineers designed a $75 Rasperry Pi that connects to a common household router with an internet connection, and can delete any tweet within milliseconds. We even have a variant that loads itself onto the firmware of solid state drives.”

Indeed, it was discovered that the most likely cause of a nuclear apocalypse was letting Donald Trump continue to use Twitter.

“The goal of the system is to suppress all of Donald Trump’s tweets before North Korea sees them. Much more effective than any missile defense system I have ever seen. It’s as simple as that.”

In Albany, New York, a small lab practices training scenarios involving these situations.

“We get a guy to basically Tweet like crazy at the control. And this guy, the control, grows increasingly irate, until he basically pushes the button. We have the main subject taunt, poke fun of, and generally humiliate the control via a Twitter connection, and then a small team decides if they need to defend the scenario, if and when the control fires an offensive,” Elliot said.

“Literally, in every test, after a window of time, if the subject does not stop Tweeting, the control has decided to fire the missile. And on the contrary, when Tweeting stops, the control resorts to listening to Ariana Grande, Watching shows on Netflix that are not really even that good, talking about how bad the Giants suck, and watching pornography. Basically, he becomes American.”

Donald Trump tweeted that this was ‘FAKE NEWS’ shortly after this article was published.