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Should the President Have Unchecked Authority to Start a Nuclear War?

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The U.S. military is prepared for the day America faces the unthinkable -- a nuclear war.

No detail has been overlooked.  Procedures are in place to make sure that the country's nuclear arsenal is ready in case a launch order from the president is received in anticipation of or in response to an unprovoked attack by another country.

We know the leather case known as the "football" contains the nuclear codes and travels with the president aboard Air Force One.

Yet, how the military command would respond to such an order remains for some a nightmare scenario.

For example, what would happen if the president ordered a nuclear strike and the commanding general at Strategic Command refused the order, believing it to be illegal?

Robert Kehler, a retired general who once led that command, was asked that question at a congressional hearing last week.

"You'd be in a very interesting constitutional situation," he replied.

Brian McKeon, a senior policy adviser in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, said a president's first recourse would be to tell the defense secretary to order the reluctant commander to execute the launch order.

"And then, if the commander still resisted," McKeon told The Associated Press. "You either get a new secretary of defense or get a new commander,"

One way or another, the order from the commander-in-chief would be carried out.

On Saturday, Gen. John Hyten, the current head of Strategic Command, attending the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada, said he would refuse a launch order from a president if he believed that order to be illegal. Hyten also predicted that the president would then ask him for options that Hyten judged to be legal.

A Senate hearing last week was the first to be held by Congress on presidential authority to use nuclear weapons since 1976. Then Rep. Richard L. Ottinger, D- NY, pushed for the U.S. to declare it would never start a nuclear war.

Ottinger said he wanted to "eliminate the prospect that human ignorance and potential human failure in the use of nuclear materials, especially nuclear weapons, will lead to the destruction of civilization."

Fast forward to the present day --  the U.S. hasn't ruled out first-strike nuclear options and is unlikely to do so during President Trump's tenure. This troubles experts who ask if a president should have the sole authority to initiate nuclear war.

"We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests," said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said at the outset of last week's hearing.

The committee chairman, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he was not targeting Trump. But he has also publicly questioned whether Trump's aggressive rhetoric toward North Korea and other countries could lead the U.S. into a world war. In the end, Corker's hearing produced little motivation leading to any legislation to alter presidential authority when it comes to nuclear war.

James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he saw politics at play, but an important subject was discussed.

"But I think it's a genuinely important subject, and I think it's one we should be debating irrespective of who the president is," he said.

Acton said a president rightly has unchecked authority to use nuclear weapons in response to an actual or imminent nuclear attack.  The president, according to Acton, should be required to consult in advance with the secretaries of state and defense, and the attorney general, and get approval from two of the three before acting.

Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School, says changes like the one Acton suggested would be a valuable check on the president and protect his nuclear authority from potential military insubordination.

Waxman and Richard Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, have this proposal: To order a nuclear first strike, the president would first have to get "certification" from the secretary of defense that the order is valid and authentic, and from the attorney general that it is legal.

"These added safeguards wouldn't risk delaying a response to an enemy attack in progress," Betts said. "They would apply "only in situations where the United States is considering starting the nuclear war."

 
 

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