My Nuclear Button is ‘bigger and more powerful’, Trump Tells Kim Jong-un

US President Donald Trump has boasted that his nuclear button is “much bigger” and “more powerful” than North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s.

Mr Trump’s tweet is the latest contribution to the increasingly personalised feud between the nuclear-armed leaders.

Mr Kim threatened earlier this week that his nuclear launch button was “always on my table”.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Trump’s unorthodox words sent social media into a frenzy.

It ended a quickfire day of tweeting by Mr Trump that included taking credit for a lack of plane crashes, announcing awards for “corrupt media”, and threatening to pull aid from Palestinians who do not show “appreciation or respect”.

Mr Trump’s latest comment states the obvious: any US president has immediate access to the nuclear codes and the US has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.

North Korea claims it has nuclear weapons and could strike the US, but while analysts agree that Pyongyang has nuclear weapons, it is not clear whether it has the technology to use them in anger.

In contrast to the bickering on Twitter, on the Korean peninsula itself, the North reopened a telephone hotline to the South.

The BBC reports that just as President Trump’s unorthodox Twitter habits have puzzled observers in the past, the tweet is again redefining what’s considered a diplomatic or presidential tone.

“I guess the president regards this as a show of strength,” said Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, on CNN.

“But as everybody who’s ever been in a… first grade playground recognises, it’s usually the person who’s most aggressively pounding their chest that is in fact the weak one on the playground.”

Eliot A Cohen, who advised the Republican former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said the tweet was childish yet deadly serious.

Several argued that Twitter should not allow “calls for nuclear war” to be broadcast on its platform.

But Mr Trump’s supporters have defended him, saying his comments were both factually accurate and showed American strength and resolve.

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