According to the US constitution, the president is the commander in chief of the military forces and thus has the power to order them to do anything without anybody being able to challenge that decision. That power extends to the use of nuclear weapons. A new book by two Washington Post reporters says that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley, the head of the US military, was so concerned that Trump had become unhinged by his election loss and the events of January 6th that he feared he might ‘go rogue’ and do something dangerously irrational such as start a war, perhaps with nuclear weapons. Milley reportedly convened a meeting of the officers who would be involved in the process to tell them that they had to promise to make sure that any order to start a war or use nuclear weapons also involved him. Milley also called his Chinese counterpart to reassure him.
Woodward and Costa write that Milley, deeply shaken by the assault [on January 6th], ‘was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.’
Milley worried that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ the authors write.
“You never know what a president’s trigger point is,” Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.
In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.
“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.
This has created an uproar, that Milley was violating the constitution by taking away the prerogative of the president.
Milley’s fear was based on his own observations of Trump’s erratic behavior. His concern was magnified by the events of January 6 and the ‘extraordinary risk’ the situation posed to US national security, the authors write. Milley had already had two back-channel phone calls with China’s top general, who was on high alert over the chaos in the US.
Then Milley received a blunt phone call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to the book. Woodward and Costa exclusively obtained a transcript of the call, during which Milley tried to reassure Pelosi that the nuclear weapons were safe.
Pelosi pushed back.
“What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?”
Pelosi continued, “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”
According to Woodward and Costa, Milley responded, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.”
This has caused an uproar, with some arguing that Milley had undermined the principle of civilian control of the military, and led to calls in some quarters for his resignation or firing.
What is astonishing is that both Pelosi and Milley take it for granted that Trump is nuts. And yet, he can make the decision to start a nuclear war and no one can stop him. Is there really no check on this awesome power?
A few years ago, Radiolab explored this question as to what checks and balances, if any, existed on the president on the decision to launch a nuclear war. They told it through the lens of Harold Hering, a missile launch officer, one of the people “who sit in a underground bunker and just wait to get an order to turn their key and unleash a nuclear attack.” This is a major responsibility and Hering took it very seriously. These low-level officers are not expected to question the order, just carry it out. Radiolab producer Latif Nasser described the training Hering got. There are always two officers needed to execute the order, so that a Dr. Strangelove situation, where a single military officer decides to launch a nuclear strike, does not occur..
So imagine that [Hering] gets an order to launch. That order has to be decoded, so he would decode the order and then his partner would decode the order, and then they would verify it with one another. So one guy would be like, “Okay. I got the order Alpha Bravo One Two Four.” And then his partner would say, “I confirm. Alpha Bravo One Two Four.” And then they launch. So neither of them has the power to launch on his or her own.
The two officers each had a key and had to turn their keys simultaneously in order to launch the missiles and one person could not do it even if they had both keys. Each of them was armed so that they could shoot the other person if they tried to force them to launch the weapons.
But while Hering was satisfied with these checks on low-level officers, he started to wonder how to know what checks existed at the presidential level. Questions about whether the president might not be in his right mind occurred in 1974 with Richard Nixon when he was drinking heavily during the Watergate crisis and this was when Hering started to wonder about whether there was a system to prevent the president from just picking up the phone on a whim and order the deaths of 60 million people. How could he know that the order he received was not an invalid, unlawful one?
He started asking his superiors that question and was asked to put it in writing. He wrote that if he was given the order he would follow it but that he would have a “conflict of conscience” because “I would be required to assign blind faith values to my judgment of one man, the President. Values which could ultimately include health, personality and political considerations. This just should not be.”
Hering never got the reassurances he sought about any checks and balances on the president. Instead what happened was that his mere raising of the issue got him in trouble and eventually ruined his career. Hering was put on trial for asking his question and the judge urged his to forget it and just do his job. But he persisted up the chain of command, also writing to members of Congress and even the president. He was seen as a pest but instead of reassigning him to some other branch of the military where his ‘crisis of conscience’ would be allayed, they punished him.
“My promotion to lieutenant colonel was withheld. I was removed from flight status, so I no longer would get flight pay. I was then permanently disqualified from the human reliability program, and along with that my top secret security clearance was taken away from me. And once you have a security clearance removed and you’re permanently disqualified, there’s no hope for your career.
…I pursued every avenue available to me to have my military record corrected, and to have the findings reversed and to remain in the Air Force. Only after I exhausted all of my appeals was I ordered to be retired.”
He became a truck driver.
We should compare his story with that of Stanislav Petrov, his counterpart in the Soviet Union, who in 1983 saved the world from nuclear war by deciding on his own that the alert that he received that the Soviet Union was under a nuclear attack from the US must be a mistake and as a result he did not inform his superiors about it, as his training required him to do, and which could well have resulted in a retaliatory strike with catastrophic consequences for the entire world.
The Soviet Union’s missile attack early warning system displayed, in large red letters, the word “LAUNCH”; a computer screen stated to the officer on duty, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, that it could say with “high reliability” that an American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) had been launched and was headed toward the Soviet Union. First, it was just one missile, but then another, and another, until the system reported that a total of five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched.
“Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike?” my colleague Max Fisher explained. “If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation; there would be no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US.”
…But Petrov did not report the incoming strike. He and others on his staff concluded that what they were seeing was a false alarm. And it was; the system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for a missile. Petrov prevented a nuclear war between the Soviets, who had 35,804 nuclear warheads in 1983, and the US, which had 23,305.
…Preventing the deaths of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people was a costly decision for Petrov. If he had been wrong, and he somehow survived the American nuclear strike, he likely would’ve been executed for treason. Even though he was right, he was, according to the Washington Post’s David Hoffman, “relentlessly interrogated afterward [and] never rewarded for his decision.”
After the Cold War, Petrov would receive a number of commendations for saving the world. He was honored at the United Nations, received the Dresden Peace Prize, and was profiled in the documentary The Man Who Saved the World. “I was just at the right place at the right time,” he told the filmmakers. He died in May 2017, at the age of 77.
The staff at Radiolab decided to pursue Hering’s question and find out what checks and balances there are and much of the show deals with their investigation. They asked around and the only person that was suggested by scholars that might be able to question the president about the launch order was the secretary of defense. So they asked William Perry who held that position under president Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1997. Perry says that the president need not even ask for his advice, let alone take it. He describes the process.
“[T]he system is set up so that only the President has the authority to order a nuclear war. Nobody has the right to countermand that decision. He might choose to call the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get his advice or his counsel, but even if he does that he may — he may or may not accept that counsel.
…He has the call directly to the Strategic Air Command to do the launching, and they will respond to his orders. They don’t call the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman and say, “Should I do this?” They do it.”
So there we are. As it stands, there is absolutely no check on the president’s ability to order a nuclear strike, as frightening as the thought is. Why? The rationale given for this system is that in the event that another country launches a nuclear attack on the US, there would be no time for consultations about how to respond, since there would only be about six minutes between awareness of the attack and when the missiles hit, destroying the command and control centers of the US military. They argue that having the president be the sole decider serves as a deterrent to potential enemies by ensuring that there would be an immediate response.
There are other options that have been considered. One is to remove all fixed land-based missile systems and put them in the air or on submarines making them harder to target, so that the window of time needed to launch a retaliatory strike is greater. Congress had also been discussing legislation that says that unless the United States has been verifiably attacked, then the president has to go to Congress for permission before they launch nuclear weapons and that before the President can launch a nuclear first strike, the President must first get a declaration of war from Congress.
This bill was not in response to the Trump presidency. It was actually drafted before the 2016 election when people thought that Hillary Clinton would win. But Trump’s election scuttled the plan since he would never agree to it. Sociopath that he is, he loved to talk about how he had the power to launch a nuclear strike.
Perhaps the controversy over Milley could act as a trigger to really reform the system, since Trump has shown us that that there is no guarantee that only a rational person would be elected president.
It is time to change the system. No single individual should have this kind of power. It is horrifying that we have to even discuss the best way to launch nuclear weapons, something that should be unthinkable on its face.
I don’t know if this would have qualified as a “check” but Roger Fisher had an idea about the president and the launch codes.
I seem to recall hearing that back in the Nixon days, when impeachment was looming and he was getting more and more unhinged, the military brass did the same sort of thing.
I don’t know that there would be any constitutional bar against Congress limiting the President’s authority to use nuclear weapons. After all, the Constitution places the power to declare war on Congress, not the President. And a nuclear attack would effectively be a declaration of war. The reason presidents have been able to do whatever they want is that Congress has almost always been too cowardly to stand up to the president. However, they have done so in the past — cf. the War Powers Act, back in Nixon’s time.
I don’t know. There are all sorts of loons in different quarters who say all sorts of stuff. It seems like the CJCS can talk to the NMCC and maybe request that he be contacted. But I don’t think they have to take orders from him.
If “civilian control of the military” means they can engage in whatever covert and/or illegal shit they feel like without any form of democratic oversight, or practically anything even if it’s not supported by most of the civilian population, then that already means very little. No?
Pretty sure that’s not the astonishing part.
There are a couple different ways to remove the President. Also, Congress can refuse to fund and support military actions (or anything else for that matter), and it can reclaim or revoke all sorts of powers that it has handed over to the executive branch over the years.
Of course, that kind of stuff often takes a lot of time and cooperation, but it can be done.
Is Biden’s finger on the button right now? No? Then get started.
If the President makes a very sudden decision (like a nuclear strike) that everybody hates, that’s the reason why they may not be (practically) capable of preventing it. It’s not because everyone else lacks the constitutional authority to do so.
Do they really want to exercise that power and be held responsible for it? No. They always want to shift responsibility to someone else, preferably someone in the other party, or failing that, to some other obscure figure like the parliamentarian or whatever.
Very doubtful. Both Pelosi and Biden (and presumably Schumer) are fine with Milley. It seems like he’s keeping his job. As far as they’re concerned, Trump was the bad guy in the story. And it’s just a fairy tale that any of these people care about “civilian control” … or about peace, having “rational” people in office, or any of it.
Dismantle all of our nuclear weapons, and encourage everyone else to do the same. You don’t have to choose between one horrifying way to launch them and another horrifying way to launch them. Just don’t have any nukes to launch. Problem solved.
We should not have such a ludicrously huge arsenal, anyway. Cut it back to, say, 3 ballistic missile subs and save billions and billions$. Or massive conventional warheads. Its not as though 2000lbs of plain old high explosive won’t grab someone’s attention.
There were plenty of times that Trump’s infirmity was teased and power-hungry enablers kept propping him up. For fuck’s sake, the guy was bragging about his performance on an alzheimer’s cognitive decay measurement. If there’s any good news in all of this its that the republicans may be sick of being shackled to such a political liability. I hope their party implodes over it. But if they run him again, they ought to be toast as long as the dems don’t keep propping up an embalmed Biden. Gah, what a clusterfuck.
It is hard to get Americans to agree on anything anymore, but I bet most of us would agree that at least one of our last two presidents is mentally unfit. I would support a constitutional amendment requiring some sort of test proving their mental health before allowing them to run.
marner, if we have “mentally healthy” candidates who are still way past retirement age and wealthy, then that didn’t solve most of our actual problems. As it is, it’s like you need to be on social security but also too rich to need the money. It’s actually those “normal” people who are the dangerously irresponsible and incompetent and arrogant capitalists/imperialists that are making the terrible decisions which get all of us so worried.
But is that the sort of information you expect to get out of a psychological evaluation? What kind of test would that be exactly? And why can’t you simply pay attention to those candidates, when they very lucidly tell everybody who’s interested in listening that this is exactly who they are and what they stand for? Does the electorate need to take a psychological evaluation too? How would that work?
Just elect younger and poorer people, and if our so-called “experts” decide that they’re not fit for the job, then that’s probably a good sign that they are. So let’s just ignore those folks and vote for better candidates who aren’t so interested in destroying this country and the rest of the world.
About the checks on launch officers, there was a good movie on that, about conflict between launch officers on a nuclear sub. Can’t remember the name, but it was a good movie, Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman.
Agree with Marcus R., we should dump most nukes, at the very least, and change the present system. Nukes are very mid-twentieth-century anyway, and not of any use in today’s world. I mean that, the era during which a launch was an actual response that any country would consider has passed or is passing.
These days, something more “surgical” and less world-ending, with fewer side effects on valuable real estate (land), would be the weapon of choice.
Like, remember neuton bombs? They will kill all the people, but leave the important and valuable stuff--the land, buildings, and infrastructure--entirely untouched, ready for the conquerors to use.
Now, there’s a 21st-century weapon.
Uh, right…. As long as you promise to destroy lives in a way which is of some “use” in today’s world, I can’t imagine why anybody would ever complain about that. Consider yourself hired.
Their choice is to “surgically” target unknown individuals in weddings, school buses, hospitals, mosques, apartments, you name it. Because the world itself doesn’t literally end, and some think they can just look the other way. And when real estate prices drop, do you think it really bothers them that they can afford more?
It’s all worked so well, hasn’t it? Like everybody knows, we just can’t stop winning all of our wars, because of all of the fucking geniuses who think they know how to do the next one “better.” There is a danger, however, because soon enough, we might run out of new people to murder and countries to destroy. I mean, sure, we could bomb ourselves just to pass the time for a little while longer, but even that will eventually come to an end. So what then? Isn’t there an easier way to get to the end of the wars?
I meant, it’s always so inconvenient when that valuable land becomes radioactive for a time. No one can just move in and occupy it.
Neutron bombs don’t leave radioactive fallout (or, much less anyway), so they’re a lot more convenient. They only kill all the people! But, as you say, even that does run into diminishing returns, so really, how about we just stop all this?
@ garnetstar About the checks on launch officers, there was a good movie on that, about conflict between launch officers on a nuclear sub. Can’t remember the name, but it was a good movie, Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman.
Crimson Tide. the sub was the USS Alabama. And a happy ending with Hackman [the slightly crazy captain] gets to retire honorably.
Sticking to the text of the law as it is written, no there is no delaying or stopping the president, any president, perhaps outside the 25th amendment, from nuking anyone they chose at any time.
The few implied controls went away in the 50s and were, by the mid 70s, considered quaint. What changes was the USSR having ICBMs in the late 50s and, in the 70s, getting submarine launch nuclear missiles. Before the USSR had ICBMS the time allocated for launch was a matter of hours. Perhaps days as it was expected that we would detect the preparations. With ICBMs it was, as I understood it, most of an hour worse case but perhaps hours of warning, When the USSR developed submarine-launch ICBMs it was not inconceivable that the president might only get ten minutes. Here again the US navy worked mightily to keep Russian missile subs far enough off-shore to buy another ten or fifteen minutes, and they got really good at it, but no guarantee.
As written, if the president calls for the “football” it should be at hand in a minute. He would then insert the “biscuit” that guarantees it is the president using the football and essentially give the nuclear authorization order to execute a plan.
There is no provision, outside the 25the amendment, for dealing with a president that goes nuts.
That said there do seem to be linkages that might delay action. Clinton once sent the “biscuit” to the cleaners with his suit. I’m sure there is a backup. But it does show buying time may be possible. Slow-walking everything while the cabinet gets their 25th on is a possibility.
My own creative alternative is a bit bloodier: The guy with the “football” is always armed. If the vice president agreed to a all-points blanket pardon, new identity, and a large cash sum in a Swiss bank it might be arranged for the guy with the football to unload his sidearm into the base of the president’s skull. He then drops the weapon and surrenders.
The vice becomes the actual and the pardon goes into effect. Marshals escort him out and so begins his, and his families, process of going into witness protection where they disappear.
The White-House staff then work diligently to spin any rhetoric as a momentary outburst. Then the ‘president goes to bed, has a nice sleep, rises with the sun, and suffers a nasty fall in the bathtub’. Declared dead all the formalities are observed. There is a nice funeral and flags are at half-mast for the appropriate number of days. We mourn, each in his own way, and get on with life.
Yes, it is violent, but is saves the world from nuclear war. To my way of thinking there is something poetic about the mad tyrant threatening the life of the planet paying for it with his own life.
Neutron bombs: Contrary to the press releases the actual radioactivity is not less than conventional bombs. It is just that the output has been optimized to produce more neutrons. While fallout from an above-ground neutron bomb is less the neutrons tend to create radioactive isotopes of materials themselves. So the buildings might still be standing but they are likely radioactive. The degree and duration of this radioactivity is determined by the degree of neutron bombardment, the ability of the material to be radioactive, and the decay rate of the isotope created.
By some estimates it is possible to blast a city with neutrons well enough to kill everyone but end up with an intact city too radioactive to occupy for decades, or more.
But they never had any intention of moving to Afghanistan, for instance. They can remain very comfortable where they are and have others do the dirty work of mining or drilling or whatever. It never matters to them how many of those people suffer and die while they busy themselves with extracting wealth.
And look, our friendly neighborhood oligarchs don’t think Mars is too inhospitable, so there’s another sort of precedent if you like. They’d really have to do a number on someplace on Earth and still wouldn’t get anywhere close to that … unless they have some reason to start attacking the sea floor or some shit. (Sounds absurd, yes, but nothing is too absurd.)
Since it’s claimed that the purpose of the nuclear arsenal is purely as a deterrent, the only circumstance in which it would be legitimate to launch a nuclear strike would be in retailiation to an incoming strike -- however, in this circumstance deterrance has, by definition, already failed, and so actually launching a retaliation strike is pointless. Once the missiles are in the air, there is no possible consequence of not launching a retaliation strike which is worse than the actual consequences of launching it -- so the only rational course is to maintain the pretence of being willing to launch a retaliation strike, but never actually going through with it.
Unless, of course, we’ve been lied to about the purpose of the nuclear arsenal… And all of this -- in fact the entire philosophy of MAD -- is based on assuming that the associated command and control systems always operate perfectly, and everybody involved is perfectly rational (as defined by game theory). Neither of those assumptions look safe to me.
Lorn, allegedly it was carter who sent the biscuit to the cleaners.
They almost vanished after Reagan was shot.
Clinton did misplace it for quite a while.
Dunc@#15:
Unless, of course, we’ve been lied to about the purpose of the nuclear arsenal
All lies.
The US arsenal is designed for offense and presidents have constantly considered using nuclear weapons in every conflict since they were developed, with the possible exception of Grenada. They wanted to use them in Korea, Vietnam, and there were “special weapons” MLRS on the field in the gulf wars. Trump desperately wanted to bomb N Korea during one of his mood swings. Curtis LeMay tried to convince several presidents to launch preemptive strikes on USSR. The US is really that batshit crazy.
The US arsenal is desiged for offense not deterrent. They were stationing Atlas B missiles in Turkey and Italy in the cold war so that flight times were reduced for a first strike. Who cares how long it takes for a deterrent counter-strike to arrive? Current policy is developing medium range weapons, fast delivery systems, and stealth -- none of which are relevant to counter-strikes and are only valuable offensively.
Lastly: the US withdrew from the MRBM treaty and immediately began a new warhead “upgrade” which was clearly being designed in secret while the treaty was in place. Then claimed Russia was cheating. Meanwhile, it violates the NPT by giving England Polaris missiles and warheads and does “weapons sharing” with NATO to get quick strike warheads into position surrounding Russia. None of that is relevant for deferrent. For deterrent all you need is 3 ballistic missile subs.
The US policy on nuclear weapons is all lies. It does not survive casual thought.
Giving?. Selling, I think you mean. And also Trident, rather than Polaris, since 1982ish, which since 1998 has been our ONLY operational nuclear capability, making us the most lightly-armed nuclear power, and thus arguably the most pointlessly armed. Still, while the French have them…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESIJ_C9mUBI
“sooner than you think…”
As far as I can see, there is a strong incentive for anybody involved in the chain of events leading to the launch of a nuclear weapon to make sure it does not work.
If the enemy has already fired, you’re brown bread anyway. Who cares if you fire back or not?
If the enemy has not already fired, you successfully prevented global thermonuclear annihilation.The people who built, installed and maintained that equipment know that it’s never really going to be properly tested. There will always be some important component removed on purpose to prevent an actual launch, and there’s no good reason ever to put it back once the testing is done.
Or of course, threaten the other officer with their gun in order to force them to cooperate in firing the missiles. As long as there are such weapons, there will be ways they could get launched, and a full-scale nuclear war started, “by accident” (i.e. without the political leadership of any state intending it in advance). In addition to the Stanislav Petrov affair, 1983 saw another near-miss in Able Archer 83, a NATO exercise simulating an actual first-strike attack on the USSR, which convinced the Soviet gerontocrats an attack could be imminent -- so they prepared to strike. And apparently there was a false alarm in Russia in 1995 which reached Yeltsin -- who refused to believe the Americans would be attacking. Would Putin, today, react in the same way? Or Xi? Or, for that matter, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Modi… If such weapons are available for use long enough, the possibility will become an actuality.
I think for the majority of history non US leaders, on being told there’s an attack incoming, think “nah, they wouldn’t do that”.
For four years just recently, though, that logic didn’t apply.
There is no doubt in my mind that loss of the “biscuit” would not stop the launching of missiles for long. Military planners are not brain-dead simpletons. There is an alternative. The intent is that the actual POTUS has to be present and included. I expect that a simple majority of Joint Chiefs and Department heads within the White house, or similar, would be sufficient to confirm that the person presenting is, indeed, the president if the “biscuit” was missing.
That said, we have to remember that nuclear weapons have long been somewhat mythical. Somewhere between certain extinction-level destruction and entirely symbolic. Somewhere between engineering, risks which can be managed and worked around, with loopholes that can be leveraged for advantage; and magic, from which there is no defense because there is no logic or limits.
Way back I read a reprint of a report on the decommissioning of the army’s Redstone rockets. Fissionable materials were removed from the warheads and the explosives fired to see how they worked. Something like 70% of the warheads “fizzled like wet firecrackers”. Yes, Redstones were a generation out of date and those warheads were reassembled by folks that knew the system would never be used in a war. It doesn’t take much to screw up those warheads.
How many warheads would fail now? If a wealthy country like the US has most of a particular make of weapons fail what conclusions are we to draw with nations that can ill afford detailed reliability testing.
How much of nuclear weapons technology is real and manifest in functional weapons and how much is symbolic. A secular fire-and-brimstone, end-of-days, narrative intended to scare the rubes and get the kids to eat their vegetables. A good part of their power to keep the peace is a manifestation of this riddle. Lincoln described a situation as holding a ‘wolf by the ears. You are not comfortable, but you dare not let go’.
For about 75 years we have been holding the nuclear wolf by the ears. So far, so good.