President Trump cannot be blocked from launching America’s nukes if he choses to do so, a senior US arms control expert has clarified.
On Friday, Speaker Pelosi told fellow House Democrats that she had spoken to Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley about “available precautions” to prevent “an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.”
The reality, says Fred Kaplan, a Slate contributor who recently wrote a new book on the history of American nuclear weapons policy, and several studies on nuclear weapons before that, is that if he really wanted to, Trump could “blow up the world” without anyone being able to stop him.
“If Milley was honest in his reply, he would have told Pelosi that there are no such formal precautions – that, in fact, the nuclear command-control system was designed to allow the president, and only the president, to launch nuclear weapons as quickly as possible,” Kaplan writes.
The reason this is so, the author says, is because the nuclear authority given to the president was designed during the Cold War, when, in the event of an enemy launch, the Commander-In-Chief would potentially have only minutes to decide whether to respond.
And although “the system’s designers made no distinction between responding to a nuclear attack and launching a nuclear first strike out of the blue,” in “both cases, the president has untrammeled monopoly control,” Kaplan stresses.
The Democrats already tried to spay Trump’s ability to launch America’s nuclear weapons in 2017, with House and Senate lawmakers introducing a ‘Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act’ bill to make it the policy of the United States to require a formal declaration of war before nuclear weapons could be used in a first strike.
In a Senate hearing in November of that year, retired Gen. Robert Kehler, former commander of US Strategic Command, testified that while the president’s advisors can advise him on the use of nuclear weapons, “the president retains the ability to terminate nuclear weapons operations when necessary,” and has no real obligation to listen to anyone else.
A second bill seeking to prevent the president from being able to use nukes without Congressional approval was attempted in 2019, but never made it to a vote.
Multiple advocacy groups including the Arms Control Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists have expressed concerns about the president’s authority to launch nuclear weapons with no oversight, with the latter suggesting in 2017 that the nuclear launch authorization of other nuclear states suggests that “there are viable alternatives to the US system of sole presidential authority.”