Our nuclear launch protocols
are designed for a swift, unquestioning response to a presidential order.
https://thinkprogress.org/there-is-no-check-on-trumps-ability-to-launch-a-nuclear-attack-3066b856a548/?utm
Tuesday afternoon, humanity got a stark reminder of what can happen if a hotheaded ex-game show host is given control over a nuclear arsenal. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Donald Trump said while vacationing in New Jersey. And if these threats continue, Trump vowed, “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Tuesday afternoon, humanity got a stark reminder of what can happen if a hotheaded ex-game show host is given control over a nuclear arsenal. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Donald Trump said while vacationing in New Jersey. And if these threats continue, Trump vowed, “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
North Korea almost immediately
responded with a new threat, announcing that it may attack a U.S. Air Force
base in Guam.
Should Trump order a nuclear
attack on North Korea, there is nothing in our launch protocols restraining him
or providing a check on his ability to do so. Our nuclear launch protocols are
designed for a swift, unquestioning response to a presidential order — not for
deliberation and caution. Trump can end all life on Earth, and our system has
no built in a fail safe to stop him.
As former Secretary of Defense
William Perry told the podcast Radiolab, “the system is set up so only the
president has the authority to order a nuclear war. Nobody has the right to countermand
that decision.”
Nobody. Not the Defense
Secretary. Not the vice president. Not the generals. Not the individual
officers tasked with launching the missiles. Donald Trump alone decides whether
to set off a nuclear holocaust.
The reason for this is that
our nuclear protocols were designed for a very different era, when the threat
of an external enemy loomed much larger than the threat of a madman president.
America’s Cold War nuclear
strategy rested on the premise of mutually assured destruction. If the Soviets
believed that, within an hour of any strike on the United States, Moscow would
be wiped off the map, the Soviets would be smart enough not to attack the
United States. But this threat only worked if the Soviets (or the Chinese, or
any other hostile nuclear power) genuinely believed that we could get our
missiles in the air before death rained down upon us.
One implication of this
strategy is that, if the Soviets knew that one of the president’s subordinates
might not immediately carry out a launch order, then the Soviets would be more
likely to launch. Our safety depended, or, at least, so the theory went, upon
our adversaries thinking that we actually were crazy enough to meet genocide
with genocide. And that no one would stop the machinery of death from moving forward.
For this reason, many of our
launch protocols are designed to prevent an individual’s conscience from
avoiding a nuclear holocaust.
To give just one example, many
U.S. missile silos are controlled by five teams of two officers each. Once a
confirmed launch order is received, any
two of these teams can trigger the strike. Thus, even if 60 percent of the
officers refuse the launch order, the nuclear attack will still happen.
Our protocols, moreover,
aren’t just designed to ensure that the president’s order is carried out. They
are designed to ensure that it is carried out quickly.
Suppose that the Soviet Union
had decided to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. Missiles launched
from the Russian mainland would reach their targets in about half an hour.
Submarine-based missiles could make
impact in less than 12 minutes. By the time the United States verified that
we were, indeed, under attack, the president could have as few as six minutes
to make a decision whether to retaliate.
For this reason, the process
for carrying out a nuclear strike favors
speed and disfavors deliberation. If Trump receives uncertain intelligence
suggesting that a nuclear strike is imminent, the mercurial president could
make a decision in minutes or even seconds.
And there is no guarantee that
calmer voices within his administration will be in the room when this happens.
To be clear, there is one
institution that does have the power to restrict the president — Congress. And,
indeed, a bill known as the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017 provides
that “the President may not use the Armed Forces of the United States to
conduct a first-use nuclear strike unless such strike is conducted pursuant to
a declaration of war by Congress that expressly authorizes such strike.”
If Trump appeared likely to launch such a strike soon, his cabinet and the vice
president could also temporarily remove him pursuant
to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
But once a launch is ordered,
it is almost certainly too late. Congress could not pass a new law fast enough
to prevent the launch, and the cabinet may not even know that the decision has
been made until the missiles have already launched.
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