Writing Prompt: Letter from the former President of the USA

So, today I got a comment from a reader saying he liked my work.

This about made my day.  To celebrate, some writing prompt fiction.  As usual, these come from my output on Reddit and r/writingprompts.

The Prompt: The outgoing President of the United States has written a letter to the newly inaugurated President. Instead of friendly advice, that letter contains the horrible truth that the public doesn't know about. Write that letter.

Hello, Mr. President.

If you're anything like I was in the first few weeks of my presidency, you'll be getting into everything and looking for answers to all the wacky questions you can think of. I now know where Hoffa is buried, who killed Kennedy, who performed the sex change on Norma Jean Baker, what's going on at Area 51 and a dozen other things.

It's all good fun, and your staff will brief you on whatever you want for any reason at all.

Trust me on this, though, none of it is as fun as it sounds before you know the truth.
The real surprises are about the things you'll never think to ask. This one blew me away.

The USA does not have a nuclear deterrent.

In fact, no one has The Bomb. It's not possible to make one. We've been lying about this since Hiroshima. The Soviet Union were lying. The UK and France are also lying. It is no longer possible to build nuclear weapons.

It was possible, thanks to a synthetic element fabricated by the Manhattan Project, but the scientists who created it used all of it at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were then not able to make any more. We still have no idea why it worked and why it doesn't. Our best brains think Oppenheimer and Einstein cooked something up between them to end the war with Japan but to prevent the USA and USSR mass producing weapons.

Nations that discover the truth end up on the UN Security Council. We collectively bribe them to silence, although some leaders are smart enough to figure out what would happen if some nations found out our ability to turn them into glass parking lots was entirely fictional.

We have faked every test, spent millions and millions of dollars finding a reliable way to give people cancer, the whole bit. We even fake up reactor disasters, just to keep people on their toes. It's all a lie. But it's a lie that has prevented the start of another world war for over fifty years and we think it'll be good for another fifty.

Quite a lot of your presidency is going to be taken up with finding convincing reasons why we can't just nuke the crap out of some rogue nation so I strongly recommend you ignore that Kennedy crap and get serious briefings done on the geopolitical situation around the world. You need to have your game face on 24/7 in case someone figures out the Big Lie. This is why presidents in office age so damn fast.

Good luck.

You're going to need it.

Best,

The Former President of the United States.