I believe there are certain codes required to active the weapons launch sequence, although those cards are in the “biscuit” card that the POTUS carries on his person and so could be taken from him by force or theft, then someone would have to impersonate the SecDef - unless the SecDef himself initiates the rogue launch.
Until the mid 1990’s US SSBN’s had the ability to launch their missiles without orders, if they had acertained a strike had infact taken place.
The Presidential “Gold Codes” are not the cryptographic codes which arm modern Permissive Action Link (PAL) which arm nuclear weapons. The Gold Codes simply authenticate the order as coming from the President or his or her locum to the National Military Command Center (NMCC). Along with the codes, verification by a Cabinet Secretary (presumed to be the Secretary of Defense but it could be any Cabinet secretary or undersecretary, or even anyone confirmed by congressional hearing) validates the order and begins the attack process of communicating with the ICBM wings, ballistic missile submarines, and nuclear-armed bombers and attack aircraft. The NMCC then accepts the order and applies the appropriate options in the OPLAN to the situation. There is no techincal reason that he NMCC couldn’t independently initiate launch orders without presidential authorization, although obviously to do so would be mutiny and doubtless other violations of the UCMJ, and would entail enough oversight that it would require a conspiracy of high level officers that is improbable to the extreme.
Stranger
This is a bit of a hijack, but I disagree. The sensible thing to do is to launch in retaliation, because it dissuades the next would-be belligerents.
It establishes that we refuse to allow the future of mankind to be determined by people who are willing to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on their enemies.
Worrying about being nuked by another Power B after getting a good nuking from Power A would be somewhat of a luxury.
Umm… no. You’re misreading me. I’m thinking not about Powers A and B but Powers C and D. Powers C and D will remember (in theory) what happened to Powers A and B.
That is not true, though subject to the distinction I made above. The OP sort of implies and has been taken by most posters to mean, though it doesn’t specifically say, it’s an all out Russian attack against US population centers. I agree that wasn’t much, though I don’t know about ‘never by any seriously knowledgeable person’, emphasized as a scenario during the Cold War.
However, the possibility of a Soviet ‘bolt from the blue’ strike against the US nuclear force was thought about a lot. It was central to maintaining a triad, abandoning SAC bomber bases near the coasts (too short a warning time of SLBM attacks) as well as trying to find ways to make the ICBM force less vulnerable: road or rail mobile, specially designed missile submarines operating in the Great Lakes, ‘Dense Pack’ etc. Although in the end the basic answer was relying on the difficulty of pre emptively destroying the US SLBM force, and its relatively longer term independence from its bases in the US if you nuked them, as compared to bombers you’d have to use fairly soon afterward before lack of base support degraded their usefulness even if they escaped the initial attack.
But again as mentioned before, even though the bolt from the blue Soviet counter force strike wouldn’t be principally intended to kill off the US population, some of the issues raised in the thread would still come up, as to whether so much destruction had already been wrought (knock on effects collapsing US society anyway, and perhaps world society depending on ‘nuclear winter’ effect of all those big nuke surface bursts around US ICBM silo’s throwing up debris) that there would be some ‘greater good’ in not retaliating. Also in that scenario the Soviets would still have had almost their entire SLBM force (only used maybe to go after a limited number of US bomber and sub bases, not accurate enough to KO ICBM’s), their relatively small long range bomber force, some of their ICBM’s, and all their tactical nukes. So the other argument to just give up was that the Soviets still had the ability for a follow up strike that was aimed at US cities, and there was nothing to gain. Which altogether is why there was some reasonable basis to worry about a Soviet counter force first strike. Although the worry in some quarters might have been exaggerated, that’s a matter for debate.
Yes. A big issue in the 1970’s. As seen in the 1979 film, First Strike.
Do you have any more information on that? I do know one Prime Minister (I can’t remember which one) stated when asked that he would not have authorised nuclear retaliation as he thought it was pointless. Of course the difference between him and potential-PM Corbyn is that he waited until he was safely retired and his finger very far from the ‘nuclear button’ before admitting it.
I also think the Letters of Last Resort are all destroyed when the PM leaves office, a pity as they would make very interesting reading.
The R-36 (NATO Reporting Name SS-18 ‘Satan’) was presumed to be a disarming first strike weapon, and the fielding of it led directly to the US development of the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ system, as well as the more accurate and higher capability UGM-133 ‘Trident II’ and the developed but never fielded LGM-134A ‘Midgetman’ road mobile ICBM. It also led to the various bizarre basing schemes proposed by the Scowcroft Commission referenced by Corry El, which beyond the Great Lakes basing scheme (‘Shallow Underwater Missile’) also included littoral basing (‘Hydra’ and ‘ORCA’) a shell game scheme (referred to as ‘Racetrack’ or "Multiple Protective Shelter’) of fake and real missiles being shuffled around a 4000 shelter missile complex occupying vast swaths of land in southern Nevada and Utah (one proposal had a massive underground rail transport system), a series of silos drilled thousands of feet into the Rocky Mountains ('Hard Rock, '“Hard Tunnel” and “South Side” basing), surface ship basing (‘Ship-Inland’ and ‘Ship-Ocean’), aircraft basing (‘Sea Sitter’ amphibious aircraft and ‘Wide Body Jet’), airship basing, buried in the desert (‘Sandy Silo’), mobile basing (‘Off-Road Mobile’ and ‘Ground Effect Machine’), and the method that was ultimately decided upon, ‘Rail Garrison’ dispersal using commercial railways, albeit with a dedicated launch car twice the length of a standard rail car and only able to operate on high capacity railways. As an interim effort, 50 PK missiles were deployed in modified Minuteman silos at Warren AFB in Wyoming, which were the only PKs actually deployed.
There was a lot of concern in the 'Seventies when the Soviets were rapidly upgrading their ballistic missile capability with multiple different families of of vehicles with different capabilities that they were preparing for a disarming strike, and during the later years of the Andropov and Chernenko regimes, in which we weren’t even certain who was running the Soviet Union, fears about an unprovoked attack were very real. On the Soviet site, the KGB ran the RYAN operation in which agents were instructed to look for, and in some interpretations find, evidence that NATO was preparing for a preemptive attack. The early period of Operation RYAN was coincident with the Able Archer 83 communications exercise simulating a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe, which was taken as preparation for attack.
Stranger
Competitor for the shortest coup in history.
By the time the coup plotters learned of the falling missiles, and realized the President wasn’t going to return fire, and them made up their minds to murder the President, got through the ensuing firefight with Presidential bodyguards, secured the Nuclear launch code (“Football”)… KA-BOOM! Too late; the missiles have arrived.
OK, I can accept there are people who think the US shouldn’t strike back. I’m assuming it’s a surprise attack they’re talking about. But by then much of the US military and civilian population would still be alive and operating. So what’s keeping the Russians from launching a second strike?
As I understand it, both the US and Russia possess viable nuclear triads. ICBM’s are supposed to launch a surprise attack on large cities, capitals, and soft military sites deep in the continental US. Sub-launched missiles will follow for selected military targets like airfields. Bombers will be the last to go in and wipe out the secondary cities and various infrastructure.
Tell me you won’t strike back somewhere along the way?
The nuclear command system is very specificaly designed to prevent an ‘initiative launch’ by some lower level of command - codes must be recieved or retrieved and entered into launch control systems, targetting codes much be entered and verified, and a whole host of safeguards overcome before a launch can be inititated. Could some ingenious individuals manage to get a few nukes away? Sure. Enough to constitute a ‘strike…?’ Not without National Command Authority (NCA) input.
The whole point of ‘second strike capability’ is that in the event of a devestating first strike, you can still destroy your attacker. Call it the ‘dead man’s shot,’ if you will. The object is to remove the incentive for an overwhelming first strike, gambling that you will take less than completely fatal return fire.
BUT… If the NCA declines to return fire, that second strike package is going to sit there and do nothing, also.
How does that work? A sub captain can launch his own missiles if the entire chain of command above him is dead or out of communication, right? But if the chain of command is still alive, well, and communicating, what if the captain (for whatever insane reason) pretends that they’re out of communication, and goes through with that procedure? How does the live chain of command stop him?
It physically takes multiple people to act simultaneously to launch a missile - and the stations aren’t in arm’s reach of each other. He would need to get the correct codes to set targets and enable launch, not all of which are carried on the boat. The launch command requires multiple concurrence by command authority - you can’t just ‘pretend’ - it has to be verified. And even with verification, you’re still missing important information.
Permissive Action Linkcontrols remove the initiative from local comanders.
WSRT Missile Excerciseon a submarine.
A more modern boat, and a more detailed look (still with propaganda music, though).
That’s good game theory and all, but if we launch a retaliatory strike against Russia, we’re killing an awful lot of people in Russia and everywhere else the fallout will affect who had no causal relation to launching the nukes that killed us.
How many billion people should we kill right now in order to (possibly) prevent future nuclear conflict?
I’m not even sure that it would work as you hope. If Japan had had nukes in WWII and dropped them in retaliation on some American cities, would that make future nuclear conflict more or less likely?
Let’s just lay this out flat: any strategic (non-battlefield) use of nuclear weapons is a de facto failure insofar as the deterrence theory behind such weapons is that the consequences are too horrific for any rational actor to accept. That being said, if they hypothetical attacker is not convinced that the defending power will respond (credibility of response to a threat or actual attack), this represents a failure of deterrence. There is no justifiable morality in any use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations (and frankly, the notion that one can limit the use and effects of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons to a pure battlefield theater is risible) but in order for deterrence theory to work there has to be a system in place that assures a proportionate response.
If the point of this discussion about whether to respond or not is that it makes no moral or ethical sense, that is absolutely true. But that isn’t the purpose of deterrence theory; the purpose is to persuade all parties that they can achieve no advantage by using such weapons, and that the resulting destruction of their own warmaking and industrial capability will be a devastating result. To this end, the defender has to be intrinsically motivated to respond in kind and proportion to the attack even if it is immoral or ethically unpalatable.
Stranger