Congress must curb president’s nuke power
Had Twitter existed in the 1980s, I feel confident saying the hypothetical @RealRonaldReagan would not have tweeted threats of nuclear war in an embarrassingly fragile attempt to prove himself possessor of the biggest, uh, button in the room.
In fact, it seems safe to apply that guess to every president in recent memory: However poor their judgment, however foolish their agenda or lacking their character, presidents past did not and would not have issued personal and apparently spontaneous taunts of tin-pot dictators at the risk of millions of innocent lives.
But President Donald Trump would and did.
Tuesday, he responded on Twitter to a New Year speech from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. “The entire mainland of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office,” Kim said. Here’s how Trump replied:
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
That this is dangerous and stupid should go without saying. Trump’s own Defense Department does not believe North Korea’s current missile technology is capable of striking the U.S. mainland, and it is bizarre to treat Kim’s bombast as simple truth. There’s a certain circumspection needed in assessing Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities, and Trump doesn’t seem to have it.
It is evident Trump’s staff will not succeed in getting him off Twitter.
Heads of government — people with weapons of mass destruction at their disposal — simply do not need to be on social media. Quite the opposite: They need to not be on social media.
But more important than Trump’s tweet is what it threatens, and on this point, Congress must act. Our legislature is long overdue to pry its constitutional authority in the foreign policy arena from the greedy grip of an overgrown executive.
When our Founders gave authority to begin wars strictly to Congress, their clear intention was to avoid placing the enormous power of destruction in the hands of a single person.
Had the Founders foreseen the awful potential of nuclear war, it is impossible to imagine they would have trusted that power to the president alone.
Right now, the president cannot, as Trump vividly suggested, simply press a button and send U.S. nukes flying. But the president does wield enormous individual authority to wage nuclear war; the only real check on his power here is the hope that members of the Cabinet or the military with cooler heads would prevail upon him to stand down — or disobey his order. That is not enough.
In November, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing to investigate the president’s nuclear authority, but since then there does not appear to be significant progress on any legislation to curb this power. This should be a priority, and not just because of Trump. Yes, he is in some ways uniquely reckless, but both before and after his presidency, the same truth will hold: No one should have exclusive power to launch nuclear weapons. That is not so much a comment on Trump as it is on the nature of the presidency and the nature of humankind.