President Trump regularly demonstrates a great capacity for playing fast and loose with the truth. By one calculation, he publicly lied or exaggerated at least once daily during the 40 days following his inauguration. Politicians routinely bend reality or, in some cases, break with it entirely. But there is no precedent for applying such casual disregard to nuclear weapons, as Trump did this week. For good reason.

Trump garnered international headlines Tuesday when he declared that any further threats from North Korea would prompt "fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before." His bluster followed a Washington Post report that the Hermit Kingdom had developed a nuclear weapon small enough to deploy on a missile. Lest anyone doubt the president's intentions, he followed up Wednesday morning with a tweet calling the US nuclear arsenal "far stronger and more powerful than ever before" and unjustifiably crediting himself with its renovation and modernization.

Alarming, yes. But less troubling than the rhetoric itself is how Trump arrived at it. The Weekly Standard and The New York Times reported that the extemporaneous “fire and fury” line caught senior aides off guard. And the arsenal tweets are misleading at best, and at least in part demonstrably false. In other words, Trump opted to discuss nuclear escalation with the same reckless abandon he's shown for crowd sizes, voter fraud, and phone calls from foreign leaders or the Boy Scouts. Presidents have spoken with force before—George W. Bush, for example, vowed to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," and Richard Nixon used "madman theory" as a cornerstone of his North Vietnam dealings. But when it comes to national security and nuclear weapons, presidents typically choose their words with extreme care. To do otherwise invites potentially catastrophic consequences.

Free and Uneasy

Let’s start with Trump’s off-the-cuff promise to rain military might upon North Korea should it make another threat. While the strong phrasing worries observers, harsh words in and of themselves don’t necessarily mean calamity ahead. In fact, they often serve a strategic purpose, especially against a country that has stymied all efforts to curtail its nuclear ambitions. “I may not have used those exact words, but I'm glad he spoke forcefully,” one GOP national security aide says. “Nothing has gotten through to them—maybe this does.”

One needn’t look too far back in history for parallels. US General Curtis LeMay famously threatened to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age," for example. “I think it’s important not to overstate the rarity of the language,” says Scott Sigmund Gartner, director of the Penn State School of International Affairs. What's unusual here, however, is the instinct to improvise so loaded a decree. While that strategy often plays well for Trump when discussing domestic issues, it carries far greater weight when discussing an existential threat.

“When it comes to nuclear weapons, a whole other level of deliberation and careful selection of language is implied,” Gartner says. Though, in this case, seemingly not attained.

Wednesday's presidential tweets compound the issue. “My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before,” Trump wrote, apparently referring to a legally mandated review of US nuclear posture that he signed on January 27. Beyond the fact that it was not actually his first order—that distinction goes to his Day One kickoff to repeal Obamacare—it grossly misrepresents Trump’s role in revitalizing the nation's nuclear stockpile.

“The professionals of the nuclear security enterprise are incredibly dedicated to their mission, and they will dutifully execute any direction from the president agnostic of political ideologies. However, we've simply yet to receive them,” one Department of Energy official says. “As such, the idea that the president has delivered on some grand vision for nuclear modernization is extremely exaggerated and misleading.”