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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/trump-nuclear-weapons-senate/545846/
'Then What Happens?': Congress Questions the President's Authority to Wage Nuclear War
An ex-general told senators the military could disobey an illegal order. But he wasn’t sure what comes next.
A White House military aide carries a briefcase containing nuclear-weapons codes. Joshua Roberts / Reuters
On Tuesday, for the first time in 41 years, a congressional foreign-affairs committee held a hearing to examine who in the U.S. government has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. Here’s what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed: Not only is there no George and no butcher knife, but there’s not much standing in the way of a commander in chief determined to fire nuclear weapons. It was a raw, existential exercise in something that has become routine in Washington since Donald Trump’s election: unearthing and scrutinizing long-buried assumptions about U.S. foreign policy.
“Donald Trump can launch nuclear codes just as easily as he can use his Twitter account,” marveled the Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, who earlier this year introduced legislation to prohibit the president from authorizing the first nuclear strike in a conflict without a congressional declaration of war.
“I don’t think we should be trusting the generals to be a check on the president,” Markey said. “I don’t think we should be trusting a set of protocols to be protecting the American people from having a nuclear war launched on their behalf. I don’t think we should be relying on a group of individuals to be resisting an illegal order when they have all been hired by the president.”
Related Story
'One Person Shouldn’t Be in Charge of the Fate of the World'
“There could be plans in place, right now, in the White House, given to the president, to launch a preemptive war against North Korea using American nuclear weapons, without consulting, [without] informing Congress,” Markey continued, as the hearing wrapped up. “No one human being should ever have that power.”
The experts who testified before the senators didn’t say that Trump could unleash nuclear war with the ease of a tweet, but they did all agree that the president has exclusive authority to use nuclear weapons. That authority doesn’t just derive from the president’s Article II war powers. It also stems from the demands of the Cold War, when the United States needed to respond rapidly in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, and from the official consensus, which gradually formed after World War II, that nuclear weapons should be treated differently than other weapons and placed under strict civilian control. (Not all nuclear-weapons states vest sole authority for nuclear weapons in their chief executive; in India and Pakistan, for example, councils are responsible for ordering the use of these weapons.)
The witnesses emphasized that this authority doesn’t mean the president pushes a button or calls up one commander and the military automatically follows the order. Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, distinguished between “scenarios where the military wake up the president versus scenarios where the president is waking up the military.” When the United States or its vital interests abroad are under attack or judged to be facing imminent attack—when the military wakes up the president—the commander in chief “has a very limited time window to make a decision,” Feaver noted, “and I think we [witnesses] all believe that the system would carry out the order that he gave. The electorate, on Election Day, chose him to make that decision.”
But when the president “wakes up the military,” perhaps “in an extreme funk saying ‘I’m angry and I want something done’ … he requires the cooperation of a lot of people who would be asking” a lot of questions about the context and justification for the strike, which would “slow down” the process, Feaver said. Brian McKeon, the former acting undersecretary for policy at the Defense Department, said that in this scenario, he would expect the president to consult with his National Security Council and other top civilian and military advisers.
Robert Kehler, the former head of U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear deterrent, said military leaders could refuse to carry out a presidential order for a nuclear first strike if they and their legal advisers conclude that the military action is unnecessary, excessive, or indiscriminate in targeting civilians—and that the request from the White House is therefore unlawful.
Yet this argument unraveled under questioning. When the Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin asked what these military leaders could do if the president overruled them, Kehler conceded, “Other than to state their view about the legality of the move, the president retains constitutional authority to order some military action. You would be in a very interesting constitutional situation. The military is obligated to follow legal orders, but is not obligated to follow illegal orders.” (McKeon pointed out that while the chain of command for a nuclear first strike might run from the president to the defense secretary to a combatant commander, the president could simply fire and replace the defense secretary or combatant commander if his order is disobeyed.)
“I would [say] ‘I have a question about this’ and I would [say] ‘I’m not ready to proceed,’” Kehler explained.
“And then what happens?” inquired the Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson.
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Kehler admitted, laughing nervously. “Fortunately we’ve never—these are all hypothetical scenarios.”
“But we’re holding a hearing on this, so ...” Johnson responded.
When the exchange finally ended, unresolved, Kehler, the man whose job it once was to contemplate these very quandaries, let out a sigh of relief.
The committee chairman, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, had technically called the hearing. But it was the escalating tensions over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, and the concerns of Corker and many of his colleagues about Trump’s handling of the crisis, that had forced the issue in Congress after a four-decade hiatus in debating the world’s most destructive weapons.
“We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear-weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national-security interests,” said the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy, who recently sponsored a bill to bar the president from taking military action against North Korea without congressional authorization. “Let’s just recognize the exceptional nature of this moment.”
The North Koreans “don’t have a constellation of satellites to see where we are moving our forces—when [Trump] says an armada is coming, that obviously has to give them some pause,” McKeon noted. “People may say ‘Well, what he says in his Twitter account doesn’t matter. We have policies. We have the leadership of the national command authority—the secretary [of defense] and the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], they’ll take care of it.’ That doesn’t compute in Kim Jong Un’s mind—that what the president says doesn’t matter. I would be very worried about a miscalculation based on the continuing use of his Twitter account with regard to North Korea.”
Ultimately, however, the expert witnesses rejected the types of legislative restrictions on the president’s nuclear-weapons authority that lawmakers such as Markey and Murphy have suggested. They claimed that ruling out a nuclear first strike by the United States or requiring, say, Congress or the vice president to sign off on a presidential order to launch nuclear weapons would undermine America’s ability to deter other countries from using their nuclear weapons. The law shouldn’t be changed because of “distrust of this president,” McKeon argued.
James Risch, a Republican senator from Idaho, went further, warning that the North Koreans would closely analyze the hearing and that they needed to understand that the discussion was more “academic” than “practical.”
This talk about “lawyers” and “standards” and “proportionality” is “not a discussion that is going to take place in the heat of battle in today’s world,” Risch said. Any U.S. decision to use nuclear weapons will not be “made by courts or by lawyers or by Congress. It’s going to be made by the commander in chief of the American forces.” And North Korea must recognize that it is dealing with a U.S. president who “will do what is necessary to defend this country … quite quickly if he has to. I want everyone to understand how this works.”
Corker saw his cue to cut in. “I think that’s the reason we’re having the hearing,” he said.
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/17/16656856/trump-congress-nuclear-weapons-war
Trump can't start a nuclear war by himself, but there's not much stopping him
An expert on why it's easier for Trump to launch nuclear weapons than it should be.
By Sean Illing@seanilling[email protected] Nov 17, 2017, 9:00am EST
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57639085/shutterstock_643150228.0.jpg)
Shutterstock
Senators held a congressional hearing on Tuesday to discuss the US president’s authority to launch a nuclear strike. It was the first hearing to overtly address this issue in more than four decades.
The hearing was not explicitly about President Trump, but rather about the general question of whether the president currently has too much power over our nuclear arsenal. But the fact that Trump is swapping Twitter insults with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and has threatened to use “fire and fury” against the regime was clearly a motivating factor.
“We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear strike that is wildly out of step with US interests,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.
Even Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, warned that Trump’s reckless threats could put the country on a “path to World War III.”
One of the experts who testified at the hearing was Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University and a former special adviser on the National Security Council. I reached out to Feaver with two big questions: Can the president unilaterally launch a nuclear strike? And what are the checks in place to stop an unlawful order from the president?
The answer, it turns out, is complicated. You can read my lightly edited conversation with Feaver below.
Sean Illing
Let me start with a simple but important question: Can the president unilaterally launch a nuclear strike?
Peter Feaver
No. But the wording of your question is very precise. Can he launch a strike “unilaterally”? No. He requires other people to carry out an order, so he can't just lean on a button and automatically the missiles fly. But he has the legal and political authority on his own to give an order that would cause other people to take steps which would result in a nuclear strike. That’s the system we currently have.
Sean Illing
So there’s no magic lever the president can pull to send us into nuclear war, but I’m trying to imagine the contexts in which the president might give the order.
Peter Feaver
Well, there are two that come to mind. One is that the president is woken up in the middle of the night and told he has only 30 minutes or less to make a decision because we are under attack or about to be attacked, and of course that means hundreds if not thousands of people in the national security complex who've been monitoring world events and passed through various protocols have concluded this is what's happening, and we need an answer from the president. In that context, the system is designed to be able to carry out an order in that narrow time span, and he alone would have the legal authority to give that order if he's still alive.
The other scenario is that the president wakes the military up in the middle of the night and says, "Hey, I wanna do a nuclear strike," and in that setting, he would raise a lot of alarms throughout the chain of command. People would be saying, "Well, what is this? Why are we doing this?" It would require a lot more people to say, "Yes. This is the right decision."
Sean Illing
That is somewhat encouraging, but you’re basically saying that even in the second scenario, the only thing that would stop a nuclear strike would be a few soldiers deciding to disobey an order from the president.
Peter Feaver
Well, they're trained to disobey illegal orders, so context matters. If they've woken up the president because they believe they're under attack, there's a presumption of legality if the president orders a strike. But if the president wakes them up in the middle of the night and orders a nuclear strike with no context, no crisis, no alert, then there's not a presumption that that order is legal. They would raise serious questions.
Sean Illing
Still, what you’re saying is that if a reckless or illegal strike was ordered, we’re relying upon the real-time judgment of a few generals to stop it?
Peter Feaver
Basically. The piece you're missing is that in the process of doing this, it would raise lots of alarms throughout the system, so the chief of staff of the White House, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — they would all ask, “What’s happening? We just got this crazy order. What’s going on?”
If they were given reliable information that we’re really under attack, that something is really happening, then you would expect the order to be carried out. But if they’re saying, “We don’t know what’s going on. No one's alerted us," they would likely halt the process and get some clarity.
And remember that time constraints would not be severe under the second scenario, where the president wakes up the military. When the military wakes up the president, then time constraints are very short and there’s not a lot of time to check and double-check. But there's plenty of time in the other scenario, so that means implicitly a lot of people would have to go along with it.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9694671/858513880.jpg.jpg)
Activists wearing masks to look like US President Donald Trump and North Korean Kim Jong Un pose next to a Styrofoam effigy of a nuclear bomb while protesting in front of the American Embassy on September 13, 2017, in Berlin.
Omer Messinger/Getty Images
Sean Illing
As you know, there are some people in Congress who are looking to pass a law that would diminish the president’s authority to launch a nuclear strike. Do you think that’s a good idea?
Peter Feaver
I think it's wise to take a close look at nuclear command and control. It's been a while since it's been scrutinized at the level I'm talking about, not just from people inside but also from people outside asking tough questions. I think the time is ripe for that. The threat environment is vastly different today than it was even seven years ago when President Obama conducted a nuclear posture review, and now we've got cyberthreats that are much more severe than when Congress last looked at it.
But to answer your question more directly, I’m wary about looking for simple legislative fixes, because they're not likely to work and also because they’re likely to have unintended consequences that we’d have to think through
Sean Illing
Why wouldn’t legislative solutions work? And what sort of unintended consequences are you worried about?
Peter Feaver
Well, I don't think you're going to pass a resolution that requires the president to get a vote from Congress. First of all, I don't think Congress is going to pass a law that would be that severe. Throughout the Cold War they never passed that law, and I see no reason to think they would pass it today.
Second, there would be grave doubt whether Congress could act in times of crisis. The law would almost certainly have to be written so as to leave substantial discretion up to the president. In times of crisis, this law doesn't apply. In times of urgency, this law doesn't apply. In other words, you are reproducing some of the same discretion and reliance on the good faith and professionalism of the people implementing it in order for even that law to work.
Sean Illing
Do you have any suggestions about what we can or should do short of major legislative solutions?
Peter Feaver
There are several ideas that are worth considering. I think in some cases they would just codify what is de facto practice, namely that the president should be consulting with his national security team, which I think is already the practice, but it would not hurt to make that more explicit. That's not affecting the chain of command, per se. That's just clarifying that the president should be seeking advice and counsel when time permits.
But here’s the thing: There really is no way around the human element. Hardware is trumped by software, hardware being the technology and software being the rules and procedures that govern it. But software is trumped by wetware, which is the human element. The human element is the key element, and the professionalism of the senior commanders and the president's advisory team will always be a crucial part of the picture.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9694693/874130444.jpg.jpg)
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asks questions during a committee hearing November 14, 2017, in Washington. The committee heard testimony on the “Authority to Order the Use of Nuclear Weapons.”
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Sean Illing
Are you confident that the structures and the systems and the protocols that we have in place are sufficient to guard against an accidental nuclear conflict or an irresponsible deployment of nuclear weapons?
Peter Feaver
I think the systems are pretty good, but no system is so good that it wouldn't benefit from a close scrutiny and a full review, and I think a full review is overdue, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier in our interview. This is definitely not a “Nothing to see here, move along” scenario. There are real concerns, and we need to look closely at them.
On the other hand, I've read very carefully the most dire warnings of some of the specialists, and I think they are based on some misleading conflations of different contexts. They describe how the system works in a crisis and then wrongly state that this is how it would operate if the president woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to do something, and of course that's not true. It would not operate that way if the president went to the military and called for a nuclear strike. So I do think some of the worst fears have been overstated.
Sean Illing
So we needn’t be terrified by the prospect of President Trump deciding, on a whim, to fire a nuclear missile?
Peter Feaver
It’s a legitimate concern — I don’t want to dismiss it. But there are more checks in place than people realize. And while the system needs serious reconsideration, I’m not telling my family to start stocking water and canned foods in preparation for a nuclear winter.
'Then What Happens?': Congress Questions the President's Authority to Wage Nuclear War
An ex-general told senators the military could disobey an illegal order. But he wasn’t sure what comes next.
A White House military aide carries a briefcase containing nuclear-weapons codes. Joshua Roberts / Reuters
- Uri Friedman
- Nov 15, 2017
- Global
On Tuesday, for the first time in 41 years, a congressional foreign-affairs committee held a hearing to examine who in the U.S. government has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. Here’s what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed: Not only is there no George and no butcher knife, but there’s not much standing in the way of a commander in chief determined to fire nuclear weapons. It was a raw, existential exercise in something that has become routine in Washington since Donald Trump’s election: unearthing and scrutinizing long-buried assumptions about U.S. foreign policy.
“Donald Trump can launch nuclear codes just as easily as he can use his Twitter account,” marveled the Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, who earlier this year introduced legislation to prohibit the president from authorizing the first nuclear strike in a conflict without a congressional declaration of war.
“I don’t think we should be trusting the generals to be a check on the president,” Markey said. “I don’t think we should be trusting a set of protocols to be protecting the American people from having a nuclear war launched on their behalf. I don’t think we should be relying on a group of individuals to be resisting an illegal order when they have all been hired by the president.”
Related Story
'One Person Shouldn’t Be in Charge of the Fate of the World'
“There could be plans in place, right now, in the White House, given to the president, to launch a preemptive war against North Korea using American nuclear weapons, without consulting, [without] informing Congress,” Markey continued, as the hearing wrapped up. “No one human being should ever have that power.”
The experts who testified before the senators didn’t say that Trump could unleash nuclear war with the ease of a tweet, but they did all agree that the president has exclusive authority to use nuclear weapons. That authority doesn’t just derive from the president’s Article II war powers. It also stems from the demands of the Cold War, when the United States needed to respond rapidly in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, and from the official consensus, which gradually formed after World War II, that nuclear weapons should be treated differently than other weapons and placed under strict civilian control. (Not all nuclear-weapons states vest sole authority for nuclear weapons in their chief executive; in India and Pakistan, for example, councils are responsible for ordering the use of these weapons.)
The witnesses emphasized that this authority doesn’t mean the president pushes a button or calls up one commander and the military automatically follows the order. Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, distinguished between “scenarios where the military wake up the president versus scenarios where the president is waking up the military.” When the United States or its vital interests abroad are under attack or judged to be facing imminent attack—when the military wakes up the president—the commander in chief “has a very limited time window to make a decision,” Feaver noted, “and I think we [witnesses] all believe that the system would carry out the order that he gave. The electorate, on Election Day, chose him to make that decision.”
But when the president “wakes up the military,” perhaps “in an extreme funk saying ‘I’m angry and I want something done’ … he requires the cooperation of a lot of people who would be asking” a lot of questions about the context and justification for the strike, which would “slow down” the process, Feaver said. Brian McKeon, the former acting undersecretary for policy at the Defense Department, said that in this scenario, he would expect the president to consult with his National Security Council and other top civilian and military advisers.
Robert Kehler, the former head of U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear deterrent, said military leaders could refuse to carry out a presidential order for a nuclear first strike if they and their legal advisers conclude that the military action is unnecessary, excessive, or indiscriminate in targeting civilians—and that the request from the White House is therefore unlawful.
Yet this argument unraveled under questioning. When the Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin asked what these military leaders could do if the president overruled them, Kehler conceded, “Other than to state their view about the legality of the move, the president retains constitutional authority to order some military action. You would be in a very interesting constitutional situation. The military is obligated to follow legal orders, but is not obligated to follow illegal orders.” (McKeon pointed out that while the chain of command for a nuclear first strike might run from the president to the defense secretary to a combatant commander, the president could simply fire and replace the defense secretary or combatant commander if his order is disobeyed.)
“I would [say] ‘I have a question about this’ and I would [say] ‘I’m not ready to proceed,’” Kehler explained.
“And then what happens?” inquired the Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson.
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Kehler admitted, laughing nervously. “Fortunately we’ve never—these are all hypothetical scenarios.”
“But we’re holding a hearing on this, so ...” Johnson responded.
When the exchange finally ended, unresolved, Kehler, the man whose job it once was to contemplate these very quandaries, let out a sigh of relief.
The committee chairman, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, had technically called the hearing. But it was the escalating tensions over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, and the concerns of Corker and many of his colleagues about Trump’s handling of the crisis, that had forced the issue in Congress after a four-decade hiatus in debating the world’s most destructive weapons.
“We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear-weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national-security interests,” said the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy, who recently sponsored a bill to bar the president from taking military action against North Korea without congressional authorization. “Let’s just recognize the exceptional nature of this moment.”
The North Koreans “don’t have a constellation of satellites to see where we are moving our forces—when [Trump] says an armada is coming, that obviously has to give them some pause,” McKeon noted. “People may say ‘Well, what he says in his Twitter account doesn’t matter. We have policies. We have the leadership of the national command authority—the secretary [of defense] and the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], they’ll take care of it.’ That doesn’t compute in Kim Jong Un’s mind—that what the president says doesn’t matter. I would be very worried about a miscalculation based on the continuing use of his Twitter account with regard to North Korea.”
Ultimately, however, the expert witnesses rejected the types of legislative restrictions on the president’s nuclear-weapons authority that lawmakers such as Markey and Murphy have suggested. They claimed that ruling out a nuclear first strike by the United States or requiring, say, Congress or the vice president to sign off on a presidential order to launch nuclear weapons would undermine America’s ability to deter other countries from using their nuclear weapons. The law shouldn’t be changed because of “distrust of this president,” McKeon argued.
James Risch, a Republican senator from Idaho, went further, warning that the North Koreans would closely analyze the hearing and that they needed to understand that the discussion was more “academic” than “practical.”
This talk about “lawyers” and “standards” and “proportionality” is “not a discussion that is going to take place in the heat of battle in today’s world,” Risch said. Any U.S. decision to use nuclear weapons will not be “made by courts or by lawyers or by Congress. It’s going to be made by the commander in chief of the American forces.” And North Korea must recognize that it is dealing with a U.S. president who “will do what is necessary to defend this country … quite quickly if he has to. I want everyone to understand how this works.”
Corker saw his cue to cut in. “I think that’s the reason we’re having the hearing,” he said.
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/17/16656856/trump-congress-nuclear-weapons-war
Trump can't start a nuclear war by himself, but there's not much stopping him
An expert on why it's easier for Trump to launch nuclear weapons than it should be.
By Sean Illing@seanilling[email protected] Nov 17, 2017, 9:00am EST
Senators held a congressional hearing on Tuesday to discuss the US president’s authority to launch a nuclear strike. It was the first hearing to overtly address this issue in more than four decades.
The hearing was not explicitly about President Trump, but rather about the general question of whether the president currently has too much power over our nuclear arsenal. But the fact that Trump is swapping Twitter insults with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and has threatened to use “fire and fury” against the regime was clearly a motivating factor.
“We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear strike that is wildly out of step with US interests,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.
Even Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, warned that Trump’s reckless threats could put the country on a “path to World War III.”
One of the experts who testified at the hearing was Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University and a former special adviser on the National Security Council. I reached out to Feaver with two big questions: Can the president unilaterally launch a nuclear strike? And what are the checks in place to stop an unlawful order from the president?
The answer, it turns out, is complicated. You can read my lightly edited conversation with Feaver below.
Sean Illing
Let me start with a simple but important question: Can the president unilaterally launch a nuclear strike?
Peter Feaver
No. But the wording of your question is very precise. Can he launch a strike “unilaterally”? No. He requires other people to carry out an order, so he can't just lean on a button and automatically the missiles fly. But he has the legal and political authority on his own to give an order that would cause other people to take steps which would result in a nuclear strike. That’s the system we currently have.
Sean Illing
So there’s no magic lever the president can pull to send us into nuclear war, but I’m trying to imagine the contexts in which the president might give the order.
Peter Feaver
Well, there are two that come to mind. One is that the president is woken up in the middle of the night and told he has only 30 minutes or less to make a decision because we are under attack or about to be attacked, and of course that means hundreds if not thousands of people in the national security complex who've been monitoring world events and passed through various protocols have concluded this is what's happening, and we need an answer from the president. In that context, the system is designed to be able to carry out an order in that narrow time span, and he alone would have the legal authority to give that order if he's still alive.
The other scenario is that the president wakes the military up in the middle of the night and says, "Hey, I wanna do a nuclear strike," and in that setting, he would raise a lot of alarms throughout the chain of command. People would be saying, "Well, what is this? Why are we doing this?" It would require a lot more people to say, "Yes. This is the right decision."
Sean Illing
That is somewhat encouraging, but you’re basically saying that even in the second scenario, the only thing that would stop a nuclear strike would be a few soldiers deciding to disobey an order from the president.
Peter Feaver
Well, they're trained to disobey illegal orders, so context matters. If they've woken up the president because they believe they're under attack, there's a presumption of legality if the president orders a strike. But if the president wakes them up in the middle of the night and orders a nuclear strike with no context, no crisis, no alert, then there's not a presumption that that order is legal. They would raise serious questions.
Sean Illing
Still, what you’re saying is that if a reckless or illegal strike was ordered, we’re relying upon the real-time judgment of a few generals to stop it?
Peter Feaver
Basically. The piece you're missing is that in the process of doing this, it would raise lots of alarms throughout the system, so the chief of staff of the White House, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — they would all ask, “What’s happening? We just got this crazy order. What’s going on?”
If they were given reliable information that we’re really under attack, that something is really happening, then you would expect the order to be carried out. But if they’re saying, “We don’t know what’s going on. No one's alerted us," they would likely halt the process and get some clarity.
And remember that time constraints would not be severe under the second scenario, where the president wakes up the military. When the military wakes up the president, then time constraints are very short and there’s not a lot of time to check and double-check. But there's plenty of time in the other scenario, so that means implicitly a lot of people would have to go along with it.
Activists wearing masks to look like US President Donald Trump and North Korean Kim Jong Un pose next to a Styrofoam effigy of a nuclear bomb while protesting in front of the American Embassy on September 13, 2017, in Berlin.
Omer Messinger/Getty Images
Sean Illing
As you know, there are some people in Congress who are looking to pass a law that would diminish the president’s authority to launch a nuclear strike. Do you think that’s a good idea?
Peter Feaver
I think it's wise to take a close look at nuclear command and control. It's been a while since it's been scrutinized at the level I'm talking about, not just from people inside but also from people outside asking tough questions. I think the time is ripe for that. The threat environment is vastly different today than it was even seven years ago when President Obama conducted a nuclear posture review, and now we've got cyberthreats that are much more severe than when Congress last looked at it.
But to answer your question more directly, I’m wary about looking for simple legislative fixes, because they're not likely to work and also because they’re likely to have unintended consequences that we’d have to think through
Sean Illing
Why wouldn’t legislative solutions work? And what sort of unintended consequences are you worried about?
Peter Feaver
Well, I don't think you're going to pass a resolution that requires the president to get a vote from Congress. First of all, I don't think Congress is going to pass a law that would be that severe. Throughout the Cold War they never passed that law, and I see no reason to think they would pass it today.
Second, there would be grave doubt whether Congress could act in times of crisis. The law would almost certainly have to be written so as to leave substantial discretion up to the president. In times of crisis, this law doesn't apply. In times of urgency, this law doesn't apply. In other words, you are reproducing some of the same discretion and reliance on the good faith and professionalism of the people implementing it in order for even that law to work.
Sean Illing
Do you have any suggestions about what we can or should do short of major legislative solutions?
Peter Feaver
There are several ideas that are worth considering. I think in some cases they would just codify what is de facto practice, namely that the president should be consulting with his national security team, which I think is already the practice, but it would not hurt to make that more explicit. That's not affecting the chain of command, per se. That's just clarifying that the president should be seeking advice and counsel when time permits.
But here’s the thing: There really is no way around the human element. Hardware is trumped by software, hardware being the technology and software being the rules and procedures that govern it. But software is trumped by wetware, which is the human element. The human element is the key element, and the professionalism of the senior commanders and the president's advisory team will always be a crucial part of the picture.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asks questions during a committee hearing November 14, 2017, in Washington. The committee heard testimony on the “Authority to Order the Use of Nuclear Weapons.”
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Sean Illing
Are you confident that the structures and the systems and the protocols that we have in place are sufficient to guard against an accidental nuclear conflict or an irresponsible deployment of nuclear weapons?
Peter Feaver
I think the systems are pretty good, but no system is so good that it wouldn't benefit from a close scrutiny and a full review, and I think a full review is overdue, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier in our interview. This is definitely not a “Nothing to see here, move along” scenario. There are real concerns, and we need to look closely at them.
On the other hand, I've read very carefully the most dire warnings of some of the specialists, and I think they are based on some misleading conflations of different contexts. They describe how the system works in a crisis and then wrongly state that this is how it would operate if the president woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to do something, and of course that's not true. It would not operate that way if the president went to the military and called for a nuclear strike. So I do think some of the worst fears have been overstated.
Sean Illing
So we needn’t be terrified by the prospect of President Trump deciding, on a whim, to fire a nuclear missile?
Peter Feaver
It’s a legitimate concern — I don’t want to dismiss it. But there are more checks in place than people realize. And while the system needs serious reconsideration, I’m not telling my family to start stocking water and canned foods in preparation for a nuclear winter.
