Donald Trump often talks about trying to keep America’s adversaries scrambling to sort out his true intentions by being deliberately vague — and sometimes contradictory — in his public comments. His new call for the US to “expand its nuclear capability” has done that to his own aides as well.

Trump ignited his latest firestorm on Thursday, when he tweeted: "The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes."

The striking yet ambiguous comment was immediately interpreted as a sign that the Trump administration was willing to abandon decades of work by presidents of both parties — beginning with Ronald Reagan — to reduce America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons to lower the risk of a catastrophicarsenal.

In part, his efforts reflect the urgent calls of top national security officials from both parties.

In 2008, then–Defense Secretary Robert Gates — a Republican who had served in the George W. Bush administration before later holding the same job during the Obama one — said the dire state of the US nuclear arsenal meant that it would be difficult to cut the numbers of nuclear weapons without potentially threatening American national security.

"To be blunt, there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program," he said. "Currently, the United States is the only declared nuclear power that is neither modernizing its nuclear arsenal nor has the capability