The most comprehensive report yet that I’ve seen on this is from France 24:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QucZ4tIXlg
“Was Donald Trump ‘blocked’ from using the nuclear codes against Iran? • FRANCE 24 English”
21 April 2026, Vedika Bahl reports, for France 24 English
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2 seconds
ANNOUNCER: Hi Vedika, you’re going to be talking to us about some allegations that have surfaced online alleging that Donald Trump has been blocked from using
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nuclear codes against Iran. Talk us through what is circulating.
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VEDIKA: Well, Sharon, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson alleged on a podcast this week that Donald Trump wanted to use the nuclear codes against Iran, but that he
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was blocked from doing so by General Dan Caine, uh, his the chairman of his joint chiefs of staff. So, let’s take a listen now directly to those claims that we heard uh in this podcast this week.
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“They had an emergency meeting Saturday night and apparently, well, one report coming out of that meeting at the White
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House is that Trump wanted to use the nuclear so-called use, the nuclear codes,
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and General Dan Caine stood up and said no. Uh, he invoked uh uh his his
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privilege as as the the head of the military so to speak, uh, it was apparently quite a blowup. There are
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pictures of Caine coming out of that meeting with his head down to the ground.”
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So as we heard there, he described uh that interaction as quite the blowup, and he went on to say that there’s some very bizarre things going on in DC. Now, this
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all comes as concern has mounted over Donald Trump’s, uh, unpredictable behavior and conduct both in public speeches and also online with the images that he’s
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been showing. We’ve all seen uh the AI images he posted depicting himself as Jesus. We’ve been covering a lot of those uh incidents here on “Truth or
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Fake.” But lawmakers, uh, recently, some even in Trump’s own party, have been vocal, Sharon, uh in their doubt that Trump is fit to serve due to this erratic behavior,
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ANNOUNCER: And Vedika, is there actually any truth to these allegations? What exactly do we know? Well, CNN reported that Dan Caine, uh,
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Pete Hegseth, and other top US officials, were pictured uh, arriving at the White House on Saturday, 18th April, the date that Larry Johnson claimed uh, this
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meeting took place in that podcast. Also in that podcast, as we heard there, he claimed there was a there was images uh,
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of General Caine leaving uh, the White House, storming out, head [facing] down to the ground, and the this is the image that was shared in that podcast. However,
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this idea of — no, that Caine stood his ground, does clash with the reality [no — with the principle, if the subordinate actually does disobey his master] of the command chain. Caine is an adviser.
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He’s not a commander, and technically nobody has uh the the authority to overrule the president’s decision [of whether to use nukes]. So,
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that does make it difficult to verify this claim, as there are no credible reports to back up the allegations made by Larry Johnson. In fact, even himself
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uh he has posted since then on his blog, saying that he has no confirmation that the report is verified. But what has been reported is that there has been
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some conflicting ideas between General Dan Caine and Donald Trump. In February,
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Trump took to to to truth social to say that in Dan Caine’s opinion, if the US was to strike Iran, it was Dan Caine’s opinion that it would be something
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easily won. But that’s not what uh Dan Caine allegedly told Trump at the time. According to the Washington Post,
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according to its sources, Caine had in fact cautioned the US president about attacking Iran. He had expressed his concerns about the scale of the campaign uh and potential US casualties,
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shortfalls in munitions uh etc. The New York Times has also uh reported about uh Dan Caine’s muddled responses about Trump’s
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threats to Iran, particularly that one about wiping out an entire civilization,
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saying that despite being Trump’s top military adviser, uh Caine has struggled to answer questions about the president’s war rhetoric. Now, there’s also been
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reports that Trump was in fact intentionally excluded from the situation room during uh the recent critical uh operation in Iran to rescue
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US airmen there. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump was in such a volatile state that I quote, “He spent hours screaming at aides in the West
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Wing, military officials made the call to limit his access and update him only when needed on the phone.” So whilst we don’t have proof of verified nuclear
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strike intent, there does seem to be a gap here between, uh, the the US president’s rhetoric and the stance taken by uh his joint chiefs of staff.
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And I think that’s really what has fanned the flames of this story.
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——
What caused that flare-up in the White House on April 18th was — regardless of what the exact details of it were — a conflict between the U.S. President and his appointed officials, some of whom, including his Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, who had warned him not to invade Iran again on February 28th, but Trump instead took the advice of his fundamentalist Christian Crusading Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and did bomb Iran again; and there had turned out, from this invasion, to be a real prospect that America might be defeated in this war. This is clearly what the flair-up was about.
The attending officials, at that meeting in the Situation Room, were: JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Scott Bessent, Susie Wiles, Steve Witkoff, John Ratcliffe, and Dan Caine.
Caine is the President’s chief military advisor. Hegseth is the chief military executioner. Bessent is the chief economic-policy advisor. Wiles is Trump’s Chief-of-staff. Witkoff is the chief negotiator. Ratcliffe is the foreign-intelligence chief. So: both the military and the diplomatic planners and executioners were there. The topic was whether to back down or instead to escalate further the Iran war. Caine advised backing down. Hegseth said escalate. The natural question, therefore was: If we escalate and find ourselves losing, then should we go to nuclear war (since that would then surely conquer Iran) instead of losing? Caine appears to have been arguing no on that question. He thinks that nuclear weapons are only last-resort weapons if the only alternative would be that the U.S. itself would be conquered in a conventional war. Nukes weren’t resorted-to in Vietnam because Vietnam never threatened nor aimed to conquer the U.S. but only to prevent itsellf from being conquered by the U.S. The same was true in Afghanistan. Neither Nixon nor Biden considered escalating those wars to the nuclear level, though our invasions of both countries were defeated. But, apparently, Trump is considering it. His repeated threats to destroy Iran have probably been sincere, not intended to be merely bluffs. That Situation-Room meeting was about what to do if in the conventional war Trump’s only two options will turn out to be either to walk away from that war or else to go nuclear against Iran.
We have no certainty that Trump was thinking there of going nuclear. But, given his personality, and his personal level of intelligence, and his consistent determination to always be a “winner,” he likely was then considering to use nukes.
This could be the most decisive moment since the U.S. empire started on 25 July 1943 as America’s President started the Cold War on that date. Iran is no part of America’s strategic interests, but Iran is now very much a part of Donald Trump’s strategic interests — and of his megadonors’ strategic interests. Those strategic interests might now be separating from those of the Kings in Arabia, who till now have been allied with the U.S. Government. If America loses the war against Iran and for Israel, then it might lose those Arab allies. However, if the U.S. Government will win its war to destroy Iran, then Iran will probably make sure that those kingdoms will go down with it. Trump thus now faces the starkest choice in his entire life — between losing America’s empire, or else destroying ultimately the world as we all have known it since 1945, when this world started to be built as what it now is.
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