Yes, a U.S. president can start a nuclear war at any time
In the wake of the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took the unprecedented step of speaking by phone with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to discuss preventing President Trump from using a nuclear weapon. She said she talked with him to explore ways to stop “an unhinged president from using the nuclear codes.” The fear is that a desperate president would start a war and use nuclear weapons with the idea that somehow that would allow him to declare martial law to stay in power. It sounds like a plot in a suspense novel like “Seven Days in May,” but unfortunately it might be cold hard reality.
Fox News tried to comfort its viewers. Brett Baier, their chief political correspondent, told them, “A sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, that’s not true. In 2018 atomic analyst Stephen Schwartz tweeted that a secretary of defense should take part in any discussion on whether to use a nuclear weapon, “but he plays no legal or practical role in the authorization and launch process.”
William J. Perry who was defense secretary under Bill Clinton for three years, replied to the tweet, “This is the correct answer.” Multiple articles in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Time and Vox agree. Duke professor Peter D. Feaver told the New York Times the most that could be done by an alarmed military command would be to delay by going to Pentagon lawyers to ask them confirm that a president had given a legal written order. What would that buy, a couple of hours?
Short of Trump’s resignation or a monumental shift in the thinking of Trump’s loyalists in the Senate all we can do is tremble and pray.
There’s no logical reason why a decision to use a country’s nuclear bombs has to be left in the hands of one person. Other nuclear armed countries do it differently, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Great Britain’s chief of defence staff can question a prime minister’s military order and bring it to the monarch for review. In China it’s believed a decision to launch a nuclear weapon would made by the Standing Committee of the Politburo. In India it’s done by the Political Council. In Israel, which doesn’t admit to having nukes, it’s believed a fourperson group has to make the decision. From what is known about Russia it seems one person alone cannot order a nuclear attack.
In the U.S. there have been attempts at to limit the power of one deranged leader with the “No First Strike” idea. In 2019 Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ted Lieu introduced a bill that would forbid the U.S. from using nuclear weapons first unless Congress had voted a declaration of war. If it had passed the military command could refuse to follow a president’s order. However, the bill went nowhere.
Besides worrying about an unhinged president, we need to realize that many military officers have the authority to launch nuclear weapons on their own say so. Former nuclear war planner Daniel Ellsberg in his 2019 book “Doomsday Machine” explained that the system requires field commanders be given this authority. Otherwise an enemy could use bombs to wipe out Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon and thus prevent the possibility of a nuclear counterstrike. So, if officers of an Ohio-class submarine think the higher command has been destroyed they are no doubt allowed to launch their nucleartipped Trident missiles.
On Jan. 22, an amazing treaty will come into force. Authored by the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, it forbids possession of nuclear weapons. It is legally binding, but only on the 50 or so nations that have signed it. The U.S. is not one of them.
If you’re terrified by the fact that a madman or mistake could end in nuclear holocaust, you’re not alone. Fed up with the inability of Congress to do anything to avoid nuclear war, seven Catholic activists went into a nuclear sub base in Georgia and poured their blood on a shield on a wall and hammered on a model of a Trident submarine. Six have been sentenced to prison and the seventh, New Haven’s Mark Colville, is awaiting his sentence in February. Perhaps Connecticut senators or the new senators from Georgia could appeal to the judge for mercy for Colville. After all it’s the system rather than the Kings Bay Plowshare 7 that is unhinged.