The nuclear button

In the United States, the rules governing the use of nuclear weapons are shockingly free from the basic checks and balances that govern nearly every other aspect of our democratic society. With an unstable president and simmering world conflicts, there may never have been a more urgent time for Congress to tighten the rules over the world’s most awful weapons.

President Trump could wake up tomorrow, decide to rain nuclear hellfire down on Pyongyang, and they’d be dead within minutes. No congressional veto. No court order. No do-overs.

Which is why it was so alarming when Trump warned this fall that if North Korea didn’t give up its nuclear weapons, the US ‘‘will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’’.

The existing rules are artifacts of the Cold War. The authority of the president to launch thousands of nuclear weapons at any time, at any target, for any reason is about as clear as it gets. And when the Soviet Union was poised to launch their own preemptive attack, it made a certain degree of sense, since it reduced the time needed to launch a counterattack.

But it is a tremendously dangerous policy to rely on in a post-Cold War world. Donald Trump’s erratic impulsivity isn’t the only reason to re-evaluate seriously the role that nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert play in national defence.