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Associated Press

If Donald Trump – or any US president – ordered a pre-emptive nuclear strike, could anyone stop him?
The answer is no.
Not the Congress. Not his secretary of defence. And by design, not the military officers who would be duty-bound to execute the order.
As Bruce Blair, a former nuclear missile launch officer and expert on nuclear command and control, has put it: “The protocol for ordering the use of nuclear weapons endows every president with civilisation-ending power.”

Trump, he said, “has unchecked authority to order a preventive nuclear strike against any nation he wants with a single verbal direction to the Pentagon war room”.
As former vice-president Dick Cheney explained in December 2008, the president “could launch a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen”.
“He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in,” Cheney said.

And the world has changed even more in the decade since, with North Korea apparently posing a bigger and more immediate nuclear threat. The nature of the US political world has changed, too, and Trump’s opponents – even within his own party – question whether he has too much power over nuclear weapons.
These realities will converge on Tuesday in a Senate hearing room where the Foreign Relations Committee will hear testimony from a former commander of the Pentagon’s nuclear war fighting command and other witnesses. The topic: “Authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.”

Republican Senator Bob Corker – a regular critic of Trump – said numerous lawmakers have raised questions about legislative and presidential war-making authorities and the use of America’s nuclear arsenal.
“This discussion is long overdue,” Corker said in announcing the hearing.

Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology who has researched and written extensively about presidential nuclear authority, said the US system has evolved through tradition and precedent more than by laws.
“The technology of the bomb itself does not compel this sort of arrangement,” he said. “This is a product of circumstances. I think the circumstances under which the system was created, and the world we now live in, are sufficiently different that we could, and perhaps should, contemplate revision of the system.”
Some aspects of presidential nuclear war-making powers are secret and therefore not well understood by the public. The system is built for fast decision-making, not debate.
The protocol for ... nuclear weapons endows every president with civilisation-ending power
Bruce Blair, ex-nuclear missile launch officer
That’s because speed is seen as essential in a crisis with a nuclear peer like Russia. Unlike North Korea, Russia has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States in a matter of minutes.
Russia’s long-range missiles could reach the US in about 30 minutes. Submarine-launched missiles might arrive in half that time. Given that some of the US response time would be taken up by administrative steps, the president would have less than 10 minutes to absorb the information, review his options and make his decision, according to a December 2016 report by nuclear arms specialist Amy Woolf of the Congressional Research Service.
A president who decided to launch a nuclear attack – either in retaliation for a nuclear strike or in anticipation of one – would first hold an emergency conference with the defence secretary, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and other advisers. The commander of US Strategic Command, now Air Force General John Hyten, would brief the president on strike options, and the president would make his decision.

The president would communicate his decision and send his authorisation through a device called the nuclear football, a suitcase carried by a military aide. It’s equipped with communication tools and a book with prepared war plans.
If the president decided to order a strike, he would identify himself to military officials at the Pentagon with codes unique to him. These codes are recorded on a card known as the biscuit that is carried by the president at all times. He would then send the launch order to the Pentagon and Strategic Command.

Blair said there is no way to reverse the president’s order. And there would be no recalling missiles once launched.
Although fielded and assigned for use by the military, the nuclear bomb is inherently a political weapon, given its almost unimaginable destructive capacity. That explains why the system for controlling the use of US nuclear weapons has been designed to concentrate decision-making power in the ultimate political office: the presidency.


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Donald Trump

Could anyone stop a US president from launching nuclear weapons?

A nuclear missile. Photo: handout

In this image released by the U.S. Air Force, a Malmstrom Air Force Base missile maintenance team removes the upper section of an ICBM at a Montana missile site. An Air Force unit that operates one-third of the nation's land-based nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., has failed a safety and security inspection, marking the second major setback this year for a force charged with the military's most sensitive mission, Lt. Gen. James M. Kowalski, who is in charge of the nuclear air force told The Associated Press on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2013. He said a team of "relatively low ranking" airmen failed one exercise as part of a broader inspection, which began last week and ended Tuesday. He said that for security reasons he could not be specific about the team or the exercise. (AP Photo/U.S. Air Force, John Parie)

US President Donald Trump smiles as Defense Secretary James Mattis (C) looks on during a meeting with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House on October 5, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / MANDEL NGAN

Amid tensions with North Korea, a US military handout photo dated 02 April 2013 shows a B52 bomber at Andersen Air Force Base, United States of America, 06 April 2013.

FILE - In this Sept. 10, 2014, file photo, former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington. Newly declassified documents show that a quarter-century ago as worries were emerging over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, then-Defense Secretary Cheney told allies the U.S. should not consider military action as it could jeopardize diplomatic efforts. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

** FOR USE AS DESIRED WITH UPCOMING HIROSHIMA ANNIVERSARY ** ** FILE ** An allied correspondent stands in the rubble of the shell of a building that once was a movie theater in Hiroshima, Japan, on Sept. 8, 1945 after the first nuclear weapon ever used in warfare was dropped by the U.S. on Aug. 6, 1945 to hasten Japan's surrender. Estimates vary, but about 140,000 people are believed to have died in the nuclear blast. (AP Photo/Stanley Troutman)

FILE--Two soldiers look at an atomic cloud during a nuclear bomb testing in Nevada in this 1952 file photo. Newly declassified Pentagon records show that troop exercises during nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s were designed to pursuade soldiers their fear of radiation was irrational and to give them "an emotional vaccination" to the blasts. It has been widely known for decades that soldiers were deliberately exposed to radiation during exercises starting in 1951 at the Nevada nuclear test range. The new documents open a window into the reasoning by military leaders in then-secret discussions aboout how far to go in using GI's in the tests. (AP Photo/files)

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‘He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts.’


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Could anyone stop a US president from launching nuclear weapons?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}‘He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts.’

‘He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts.’