Yeah, a Russian (“Pikayev”) said it online in English. Must be true. Who should be using the rolleyes? Trust but verify. This forum is getting worse than wikipedia.
My favorite the Onion article: Obama Makes It Through Another Day Of Resisting Urge To Launch All U.S. Nuclear Weapons At Once
If this is true, then yes he can.
That wiki site quotes documents that are no longer valid, and state false information. I think you would find the exact conditions necessary to launch nuclear weapons are highly classified, and nobody who would know would be able to post them.
Previous thread on the subject, with a lot of useful info from Stranger on a Train…
I have no more knowledge of it than the Wiki cite, but AIUI the President issues the order, the SecDef confirms, and the Chairman of the JCOS relays it to the General in charge (as you explained).
One of the things I noticed from my cite of the football is a President complaining when he looked into the briefcase was the pages and pages of documentation he would have had to paw thru looking for how to blow up Kiev. So they revamped it to a list of choices like a menu.
Proper user documentation is always a challenge, and you should always include an FAQ.
Oh, how I wish I could have been the one to write that. What an opportunity! And no consequences, because fuck, who’s ever going to know?
The Idiot’s Guide to Nuclear War
Step 1: Say your prayers.
Step 2: If missiles are incoming but have not yet hit, go to page 3. If Washington DC is already a glowing heap of radioactive slag, go to page 4. If this is a pro-active strike fueled by unchecked paranoia, go to page 5. For all other options, press *.
Step 3: Put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.
And it would be signed,
Regards,
Shodan
During the Carter administration they found it still took too long to read through, so they turned it into a “cartoon” with little pictures to explain each step. I always thought it must’ve been hard for the artist to resist throwing a little dark humor in the drawings.
Since the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the JCOS are not involved in the operational chain of command. Orders go from the President and SecDef directly to the unified combatant commanders.
Obviously this is good policy, but I wonder about its constitutionality. The President is Commander in Chief of the military. If he says launch 'em, they should be launched.
Now, a subordinate should disobey an “unlawful” order, but constitutionally, the President is in charge. Simply disagreeing that deployment of nuclear weapons is needed does not make the order unlawful. Probably never been tested since no President has ordered that nukes be launched in the modern age.
Which, worst-case, leads to the scariest version of the Saturday Night Massacre ever: SecDef refuses to co-issue launch orders and Pres fires Assistants down the line until he finds one who will agree.
I sit corrected, then.
That’s what I get for trusting Wiki.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s why if you’re the secretary of defense, and you conclude that nuclear weapons aren’t justified, your response is “blam blam. Mr. Vice President, you’re up.”
The Wikipedia article is basically correct, it just prominently quotes an old document from before the JCOS was reformed. The rest of the article explains the changes since then.
The President is Commander-in-Chief, but as you say his orders must be lawful. Congress gets to decide what’s lawful, and they are the ones who set up the chain of command the way it is.
But all these discussions about the President can and can’t do are largely theoretical since they’ve never come up.
The rest of that article has no citations whatsoever. This being General Questions, is a cite-less wiki page really considered the authority on this subject? That same tired site keeps getting linked every time this subject comes up.
“And suppose I find that one has gotten to [the President], in spite of everything?”
“You take the necessary action, the Vice President succeeds to the chair, and you get shot for treason. Simple.”
– Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters
so…is there an image of the simplified launch menu anywhere? ( my google-fu has let me down )
I too would love to see said image. But I have a serious infection of lazy-itis. It took all my power to even type this.
Are there duplicates of this “football” (nuking instructions and codes)? What is the procedure if the prez is on a visit somewhere and a missile gets tossed his way (or any other nastiness that obliterates the “football” as well)? I know it is incredibly unlikely, but incredibly unlikely is not impossible. Does the VP and everyone else in the chain of succession have an escort with a “football” as well?
Well, we know there’s at least one duplicate copy - whoever is on the other end when the President uses the device has a way to verify the codes.
More realistically, there must be multiple duplicate copies so that if the Pentagon gets nuked, the USA can still return fire. Cheyenne Mountain is one obvious place.
Obviously, there must be a thick veil of secrecy over this. One observation published in “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser was that in the past, the only copies of the codes needed to order an attack were at a small number of physical locations. Flight times from a submarine firing a missile right off the coast of Virginia (you could probably sneak a submarine to just a few miles outside of Norfolk) are less than 5 minutes. If nuclear explosions vaporize every copy of the codes, the nukes can’t be used any more.
This is one reason why PAL codes were not actually used for years (the code was all zeroes), and why much earlier in the cold war, B-52s had everything needed to drop the nukes onboard the aircraft itself. Originally, in order to set the nukes off, the procedure was
- Turn a dial from safe to “airburst” or “groundburst”
- Pull the bomb release lever.
Opening the bomb bay doors was optional - it would destroy the doors, but the weapon would crash right through them and still arm just fine. All the rotary dial did was send a DC voltage down a wire, triggering a relay in the bomb.
They later added a second dial, out of arms reach of the first one, with “peace/war” on it, and some relays so both dials had to be turned at within a short time of each other.
This is why safety was just an illusion - there were several accidents where the nukes armed because of an electrical fault, and other accidents where a nuke was dropped out of the bay. Only sheer chance has meant an accident where the nuke armed and was accidentally released hasn’t happened in the same incident.
Similarly, there have been several fires that set the high explosives off on the nuke itself. The older warheads were supposed to be “one point safe”, where if the high explosives went off at just one location, the weapon wouldn’t go off. It turned out later this had never been tested and in fact some of the weapons would go off anyway.
Anyways, officially, everything is now quite safe. However, if you read Command and Control, you’ll see the military has a long, long history of telling bald faced lies with regards to the nukes and being able to hide behind the fact that it’s all a secret. There are a long list of straight up lies that later declassified documents reveal the truth about.
I’m another person wondering about the constitutionality of this. The sources appear to be citing executive orders. If the President Obama decided to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack against Russia, that would appear to be an act of war. Doesn’t he need congressional authorization for that?
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 gives the President authority to use American forces in the event that the United States is attacked. So I’m assuming it covers a situation where Russia launched nuclear missiles at us and he was ordering a counter-attack.