Bob Woodward has a new audio book out, and it is again scaring the bejeezus out of people.

In a taped conversation with Bob Woodward, Donald Trump boasted about US nuclear weapons development.

“I have built a weapon system that nobody’s ever had in this country before,” the then president told the veteran Washington Post reporter. “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”

The recording aired on CNN on Tuesday, the day Woodward published The Trump Tapes, an audio book of 20 interviews carried out as Woodward wrote three bestsellers on the Trump presidency, Fear, Rage and Peril (the last co-written with Robert Costa).

Woodward said he looked into Trump’s claim and was told by an official it was true.

“Xi [Jinping] and [Vladimir] Putin would not know about” the weapons system, Woodward said. “But why is Trump bragging about it?”

Trump’s cavalier attitude to nuclear issues has landed him in hot water elsewhere. Documents dealing with nuclear weapons policy were reportedly among classified material recovered from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, by the FBI in August.

Trump bragged about new US nuclear weapons, Woodward tape shows

Maybe this is a strategic news release, intended to scare Putin into backing off in Ukraine? Not likely, but maybe something good can come from Trump's braggadocio stupidity.