Mods: This isn’t intended to be a Great Debate. There should be a factual ‘yes or no’ answer to this question.
Can the President of the United States, by himself or herself, order a preemptive nuclear strike against another country, or do others have to concur before the missiles begin to fly? I’m not asking about whether this **would **ever really happen, just whether it **could **ever really happen given whatever checks are in place to prevent it from happening when it shouldn’t.
Hypothetical Scenario: After weeks of careful monitoring by the Pentagon and the CIA, it’s now clear that Russia is mobilizing its military forces for an imminent attack on the West. Due in large part to severe economic sanctions leveled against Russia which has lead to the collapse of the Ruble, utter chaos and a breakdown of Russian society including uncontrolled rioting in the streets, and the disappearance of the country’s leaders, along with the sudden admission of Ukraine into NATO and a vow to return parts that have been taken over by Russian sympathizers, the Russians are bracing for an all out war to protect the motherland.
Western intelligence has determined that the deployment of their nuclear assets is imminent, even though total retaliatory destruction is guaranteed. Russian leaders feel they have no choice but to strike first in order to hopefully knock out some of the West’s assets before the West can launch a full scale response. The West has made Russia aware that it knows that its full military resources are now poised to attack, but Russia claims there are no military exercises going on and that no attack is being planned.
The President now has a choice. Wait for Russia to launch and then launch a massive counter attack guaranteed to wipe both the US & Russia off the face of the earth, or preemptively launch in hopes to destroy enough of their assets to lessen their ability to fully counter-attack. The President decides to preemptively attack and has the football and codes necessary to launch. Can he/she order the attack themselves, or do others in the government have to concur with the President’s plan?
Bonus Question: Let’s say he does order the attack, can anyone stop it from happening at that point?
The launch order needs to be confirmed by a member of his cabinet, who verifies that it came from the president and that he seems not to be off his rocker.
Then it needs to be carried out, but that’s a whole different matter, maybe.
The President needs to get the Secretary of Defense to agree. He can fire the SecDef if he refuses, and work his way down the line, but ultimately it operates under the two-man rule. Cite.
“Give me the football, Captain! I am going to nuke Moscow.”
“FUCK NO” shoots the President.
Or else the Chairman of the JCOS could refuse to execute the order, but that is not nearly as much fun.
Secretary of Defense has to approve as well in order for it to proceed.
Once so, though, there might still be insubordination/disobedience by the lower level folks who actually launch the things.
well I know from a friend that they want to make sure guys in missile silos have no mental issues. He was a technician who checked their radios. It was standard to not check everything every time, maybe they checked 80% of the list. One time a missile officer pulled a gun on him because he did not do 100% of the list. The other officer called the guy off. And the guy who pulled the gun was gone the next day.
There’s an story about James Schlesinger, then-secretary of defense, telling others to check with him if they got any unusual orders from President Nixon during the peak of the Watergate crisis. So the story goes, it wasn’t so much about launching a nuclear war as perhaps preventing a military coup that would keep Nixon in office.
In a previous thread I started on the subject, the general consensus from (I think Airman Doors’s cite was that any cabinet member will do in a pinch, particularly if the SecDef is, say, part of a rapidly-expanding cloud of radioactive ash. Taking the N minutes necessary to promote the SecTreasury to SecDef, just so that the same guy can say the same thing with a different title, might not seem like a good use of their remaining minutes.
Legally, it has to be the Secretary of Defense, not any member of the cabinet. The current system relies on having two-person redundancy all the way down the chain of command for launching nuclear missiles.
As pointed out above, cabinet secretaries serve at the pleasure of the President, so if the SecDef declines to approve the order, he can be fired and the next in line at the DoD, who becomes Acting SecDef, will get his chance to foment armageddon. The President is free to work his way through the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries and so on, until he finds somebody willing to play ball, or the Cabinet removes him pursuant to the CrazyPants clause of the 25th Amendment.
The Chairman of the JCOS doesn’t have any actual command over any combat forces; it would be the General in charge of the US Strategic Command (the Unified Combatant Command in charge of strategic nuclear weapons) who would have to refuse the order.
Keep in mind that presidents historically seem to think they have virtually absolute power as commander in chief. If this is true - their power derives from the constitution and can’t be reduced by any other law of a lower level.
So while I think there are procedures in place for the two man rule - and I assume they both get separate gold codes - I believe in theory it isn’t actually required. My understanding is (and based on US attempts to get/give Pakistan similar technology to prevent rogue attacks) it is actually impossible for the president on his own to launch the missiles. He would need someone at the NSA to give him both codes or steal and know which code was the correct one from the defense secretary.
Apparently the codes themselves aren’t super highly guarded - as one president (I think it may have been carter) - left his in a jacket that was dry cleaned. Which is probably why they change them every day - also I’m assuming it isn’t just a touch tone interface to launch - you need the football as well so a rogue dry cleaner probably couldn’t do much
In The Sum of All Fears, Clancy has the president issue an order to nuke the city of Qom. Jack Ryan (of course) was the only cabinet-level person on hand, and refused to validate the launch order. As I recall there was a list of people who could confirm the order, but not what put them on the list.
This is one of those situations where the morally correct thing to do might be to just shoot the president. If you don’t, tens of millions of people are definitely going to die.
