In leaked audio, Clinton suggests break with Obama on nukes, cyber

In leaked audio from a February fundraiser, Hillary Clinton appears to oppose President Obama’s nuclear upgrade plans and suggest that she would be more aggressive against foreign governments that launch cyberattacks against the United States.

In the 50-minute audio recording, Clinton tells the audience that she “would be inclined” to kill a trillion-dollar effort to create a new arsenal of nuclear cruise missiles, which have been opposed by some former Defense Department officials.

{mosads}“The last thing we need are sophisticated cruise missiles that are nuclear armed,” Clinton said at the Feb. 16 fundraiser in McLean, Va.

The prospect of a new arms race for tactical nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use “could not be a more threatening scenario,” she added.

“The United States has to do what we can to prevent that from happening.”

In the same remarks, Clinton appeared to suggest that the U.S. adopt a more threatening posture against other countries that launch cyberattacks against the U.S.

“They know — if they stop to think about it — that an attack on anything of significance that can cause damage to us would incur retaliation,” Clinton said. “That’s what they should know, because if they were to attack part of our infrastructure … they have physical assets that are also connected on the internet, so they have to know we would retaliate.

“So that provides a certain level of deterrence.”

The comments suggest a willingness to more explicitly threaten other countries with retaliatory cyberattacks for actions targeting U.S. networks. The Obama administration has declined to detail the precise circumstances that would provoke a retaliatory cyberattack against a foreign governments, frustrating some critics. 

Audio of the February fundraiser was posted online by The Washington Free Beacon this week. The file was stolen by hackers from an email account of a campaign staffer, the conservative-leaning news outlet said.

It’s unclear who hacked the account or if the staffer is the same one whose emails were released earlier this month on a website suspected of having ties to Russia. Hackers with ties to the Kremlin are believed to have launched a wide-ranging attack on U.S. political campaigns and election offices. 

The question posed to Clinton about the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal was posed by Andrew Weber, a former high-ranking Pentagon official who has opposed the weapons modernization plan.

In October of 2015, Weber and another former Defense Department official wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for Obama to scrap the program and take a “historic practical step in the direction of a world without nuclear weapons.”