Comment by archgoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by archgoon | Hacker News Reader

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I'm afraid that you have misunderstood the Bloomberg article. Nothing in it is about checking the power of the president (it says itself the president determines when to end the meetings and whether to ignore advice). It is all about verifying that The President has issued the order, and then ensuring that order is carried out. The President is contacted in this scenario simply because he's the only one who can actually authorize retaliation. He is enabled to do that independently, which is what the nuclear football is for.

Alex Wellerstein is a academic researcher on the history of nuclear weapons, and he describes the situation thus:

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...

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>>Are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?

What's amazing about this question, really, is how seriously it misunderstands the logic of the US command and control system. It gets it exactly backwards.

The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and _only_ the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to. It is about enabling the President's power, not checking or restricting him.

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I was just describing the official process. Having spent 14 years in the military I can tell you that it's more complex than just that.

The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and only the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to.

Yes, legally and formally. Informally though, as I said, it won't go down like that, especially if it's not completely unambiguous that there is a nuclear attack on the US.

this is not my understanding. there is no such checking because in a real threat the president only has about 7 minutes until the enemies nukes fall from subs off the coast. to be a credible deterrent it has to be assumed he can order the launch in less time than that. if verification of unambiguous threat takes more time than that then the enemy can just nuke us confident we'll all be dead before our pres can get his military to accept the order

http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-des...

I think you're technically correct, but those arguing with you (particularly those that have served in the armed forces) might cite this as a counterpoint, it takes a lot for it to make it all the way up the chain -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

who cares about launching on 7 minutes when nuke subs can strike anyway at any time even after the attack ?

But who would you give command authority for that? Here in the UK, where we wouldn't even have 7 minutes in the event of an attack from Russia, we rely on exactly that strategy (possibly - the contents of the prime minister's "letters of last resort" to our submarine captains are secret and destroyed unopened when a PM leaves office) - but the flipside is that individual submarine captains have both the authority and the means to launch nuclear weapons without requiring approval from anywhere further up the chain.

as far as i know if deep sea subs cannot contact the headquarters for x amount of time they should assume their country was nuked and are supposed to retaliate.

That doesn't answer the question. Who do you give the command authority for that decision? Who gets to say "we cannot contact the headquarters", which amounts to being able to launch the nuclear weapons? And obviously if you want them to be able to launch under those circumstances you have to give them any "launch codes" or what-have-you beforehand.

In the case of the UK, there is a sealed letter in each Trident sub with instructions from the PM in case the nation's leaders have been terminated.

Yeah, I mentioned the letters of last resort, but while the letter will contain orders, the captain has sole launch authority, and it's difficult to imagine the system could work in a way that avoids that - whatever process you require the captain to follow, they could simply decide to follow that process as though the leadership were uncontactable.

I don't know what the actual procedure is; however like with Science Fiction and 'Self Destruct' codes I would think that a multi-agent auth challenge would be required.

The captain and some fixed number of executive officers. Possibly with redundancy for one or two crew being dead. The auth codes would cause a safe to unlock or message to de-crypt.

Presumably the instructions would be delivered to each authenticating member so that all could receive the orders simultaneously.

Learning that there only is an "informal" system for nuclear strikes is fairly disconcerting and does not inspire confidence, especially if there are no added details and no available confirmation of what you told us.

By the time it became completely unambiguous, it would be too late.

From a game theory perspective the aim of the administration is going to be to make the threat of instant retaliation seem credible to any outside observer therefore preserving the effectiveness of nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

In practice however I'd certainly be surprised to learn that there were absolutely zero checks on the process as suggested in the article.

The keywords here are "whenever he needs to".

Are there verified nuclear warheads on verified trajectories from verified origins?

Does the US President need to retaliated?

The problem is that nobody else's opinion matters. If the president wants to retaliate based on 0 evidence, they can.

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