Hillary Clinton’s campaign is warning Americans of a future in which Donald Trump is in control of the US’s nuclear arsenal in a new ad featuring a former nuclear missile launch officer.
The 30-second ad, which is running on national cable TV and in six battleground states, according to a Clinton official, marks the campaign’s most direct warning yet to voters that Trump is too erratic to be commander-in-chief and could endanger the country and the world’s safety and security as president. It includes an image of a missile inside a silo as an alarm sounds in the background.
The ad, entitled “Silo,” splices the first person testimonial of a former nuclear missile launch officer with comments Trump has made, including saying he wants to “bomb the s— out of” ISIS, wanting to be “unpredictable” and declaring: “I love war.”
It was put together before The Washington Post published a bombshell story on stunningly demeaning comments Trump made about women in 2005.
In the ad, former Air Force officer Bruce Blair, who is now an arms control scholar at Princeton University, reflects on his time as a launch officer controlling intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“If the president gave the order we had to launch the missiles. That would be it. I prayed that call would never come,” Blair says in the ad. “Self control may be all that keeps these missiles from firing.”
An alarm roars and a countdown clock then sounds revealing a missile in an apparent nuclear silo, before the ad pivots to footage of Trump:
“I would bomb the s— out of ‘em,” Trump says.
“I want to be unpredictable.”
“I love war,” the Republican nominee says in a third clip.
The ad then pivots back to Blair, who offers a final warning: “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ad will air in the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in addition to time on national cable TV, a Clinton campaign official told CNN.
The TV spot evoked the infamous “Daisy” ad President Lyndon Johnson ran against 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, which featured a little girl counting down petals on a daisy before a man’s voice counts down to a nuclear explosion, featuring a mushroom cloud.
The ad is also similar to the Clinton campaign’s “Just One” ad the Clinton campaign aired in August which also warned that Trump was not stable enough to be president and included similar clips of Trump to those used in the latest ad.
Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton super PAC, also ran an ad last month that included Trump’s past comments about being willing to use nuclear weapons that finished on the message: “Donald Trump. Dangerous. Unfit to be President.”