Cracks in US nuclear command and control
axios.com
axios.com
And people need to keep in mind, the nuclear launch system while very efficient is not completely digital or automated. He can give the order, but it still requires military leadership to make a judgement call as whether to follow it.
Even if they're legally bound it's good to know that there's still someone in between who can simply say no.
They are not legally bound. They are legally bound to follow a lawful order. It's a personal judgment call what constitutes a lawful order, and in 99.9% of the cases people just follow orders. But when it comes to ending the world, I think all officers, without exception, will realize the order to nuke a random target is not lawful, and will refuse to obey.
Sadly, you’re assuming everyone in the chain are rational actors. This breaks down in a cult
But the safe bet today is to refuse any unconsciousable order because the next administration likely won't punish for it.
As someone who's refused to follow an order because I believed it wasn't lawful, I disagree with you.
The UCMJ provides good general guidance over what constitutes a lawful order, but like any legal document, it doesn't cover specifics or edge cases that crop up. This puts military personnel in hairy areas where they have to know what the UCMJ states on the subject of the order, and make a decision whether or not an order is lawful.
I know you followed up with "It's only a personal judgment whether you follow an order. Soldiers aren't the legal arbiters.", but what your statement comes down to is that the person following the order needs to decide on the spot whether it's lawful or not, and sometimes may have to argue their decision in a Military Court. This makes them de facto legal arbiters.
As for other planets, I suspect the early colonies will be completely defenseless from Earth, but if they reach sufficient level of development and self-governance, they'll want to rapidly develop capability of hurting Earth as an opening move for declaring independence.
If anything, it’s easier to spot than an ICBM. Amateurs make a thing of finding it: https://gizmodo.com/amateur-satellite-trackers-found-the-arm...
Nuclear weapons are themselves just a test for us, too. If we want to grow as a species and civilization - truly grow and reach out of our gravity well - then nukes will become just firecrackers compared to what we'll end up dealing with. Orbital velocities being what they are, any interesting interplanetary or interstellar tech will require us commanding similar or larger levels of energy on a regular basis. Which is why I suspect MAD doctrine is with us to stay - now with nuclear weapons, in the future with asteroids and power plants of large spacecraft.
lmao
This is sooooo naive.
They both heavily depend on Himalayan glaciers for fresh water, and that supply will be heavily affected by climate change if the world does not act. They could easily end up at war over water rights.
Neither of them has the really big nukes the big players have, but it turns out that you don't need big nukes to cause serious worldwide problems.
This paper [1], summarized in this article [2], looked at a scenario where India and Pakistan have a nuclear war involving 100 nukes of the size as the one used on Hiroshima (15 kiloton blast), directed at the most populated areas. That's about 1/3 of the total number of nukes those two countries have.
They estimated based on the amount of combustible material in the target areas that the resulting firestorms would put about 1.5 Tg of soot aerosol into the upper atmosphere. They then apply climate models to predict the effect of that.
The result is a 1.8 C temperature reduction and 8% precipitation reduction for several years, which would have a serious effect on food crops. They used state of the art crop models to estimate food loss over time. They found the strongest effects would be in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 years.
It's not an end of humanity scenario at that point, but would result in widespread world hunger for a long time, and not just in the poor countries. That could trigger wars involving more of the world's nuclear powers, including ones with much bigger bombs.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7071
[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-...
Technically, everything there is correct: the unilateral authority for nuclear weapons use is in the hands of the president. In particular, the military are absolutely not allowed to do anything with nuclear weapons without the confirmation of the president. This system was put in place by Truman, and this decision probably saved the planet from nuclear war many times.
Now, in practice, the president, Trump or anybody else, cannot unilaterally start the nuclear war. He has to communicate with the military to activate the nuclear football and call NMCC. The order will be handled by EAC (emergency actions controller), who has to input their own codes, which needs to be confirmed by the superior officer. Choosing the nuclear option beyond what is already in nuclear football (where only retaliatory options are placed, not applicable in the first-use context) will require active input from STRATCOM, which will take hours. At all these points, there are many opportunities to intervene and/or seek additional confirmations from multiple authorities.
Tl;dr the nuclear _retaliation_ can indeed be launched by the president in minutes, if it is already proposed by the military and the only thing the president needs to to is to reply with nuclear launch codes from the biscuit and the football. Initiating a first use attack is a whole another story, will take hours, and most probably will not succeed at all.
P.S. Mark Milley is not in the nuclear launch command chain, so he has no authority to do anything about the procedure. Neither is Nancy Pelosi.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#:~:text=Pres....
But he's also now clearly lost control with reality and is taking unprecedented steps.
https://www.amazon.com/Button-Book-Sally-Nicholls/dp/0735267...
It goes into a lot of detail about how nuclear weapons and their control systems evolved. Covers a number of accidents and near apocalypses along the way. One of my favorite books of the last decade, informative and very readable at the same time.
https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
https://futureoflife.org/background/nuclear-close-calls-a-ti...
https://www.amazon.com/Button-Nuclear-Presidential-Power-Tru...
(what you linked to is a "silly and sweet picture book [which] introduces young children to colors through humor and clever interactive elements.")
People in underground command bunkers likely have families too, and will act like most normal people.
Presidents for a long time have engaged in limited quasi-wars without Congress by hand-waving over "what is war, anyway," conducting missile strikes and engaging in targeted special operations. Congress looking the other way is a clear abdication of responsibility here, but there has been enough plausible grey area to get away with this over many recent decades of American foreign policy.
But I don't know any serious person who would look at a nuclear first strike and think there's any debate about whether or not that constituted an outright declaration of war.
We definitely need to make this more explicit though, and not rely on out of control President to test it.
We’ve gone about for too long meddling in the affairs of others. Putting boots on their grounds and haven’t the slightest bit of gall to make it official and firmly support it. These acts of ill will (however good intentioned they may have been- and most have not *see War in Vietnam) have been nothing but racketeering and have violated our own Constitution.
I agree. We must clarify and make it more explicit. We must also create a nuclear armistice. We can’t continue to go on kicking the little countries and idealogies of the world and not expect the Big Ones to at some point decide to kick back.
“ Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say? Can't you see the fears that I'm feeling today? If the button is pushed, there's no running away There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave”
From Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”
So there are scenarios where the President is not the one declaring war, but responding to aggression, but would still be the one using nuclear weapons first.
Either way you'd have to give the President the keys to the nuclear arsenal so that we'd have a second strike capability.
By the way, you seem to have misunderstood the intended lesson of the apple and the barrel. The point of the proverb is that it takes only one apple to ruin the whole barrel, not that just one bad apple is not a problem.
Maybe things have changed in 10 years, but even the most racist southern farmer I knew in the officer cprps wouldn't have bombed am American city, for several reasons.
The US military is responsible for many atrocities, but I'll eat my own dick if a US military officer ever bombs an American city.
Also, thanks for the patronizing remarks, no one uses that phrase as intended and it's now become less likely anyone would use your version. The bad apples in the military officer corps get removed very quickly, I bet your example will be court martialed and ejected with dishonorable discharge by springtime. If I had been his CO, I'd have him on literal bread and water on his way to federal prison for life for his acts, and most officers I know would do the same; the rest would probably want to shoot him.
Importantly as we've seen with Trump/Republican rule it should not be game-able with just executive power (many times non-confirmed) political appointees.
I don't like writing two party rule into law (FEC as an example) but I'm not sure a better solution even adding judiciary is partisan control these days. Even NSC has been gutted and politicized by Trump.
It's harder to confirm a low level judge or actually confirm a cabinet level staff member in Trump's admin than it is to launch an all out unprovoked nuclear assault.
That Russia plays the US right now like a fiddle: hell yes. Disarming the nuclear weapons: not important. It is at best distraction.
Actually, I am pretty sure, in that regards they would prefer more stability. Putin plays the MAD game already longer than any other ruler currently in control of nuclear warheads.
If Miley does it, wouldn’t it be a military coup, and isn’t Nancy Pelosi encouraging it? All the existing US law both statute and Constitutional is that the president is Commander in Chief of the US military and has sole authority to launch nukes.
Congress can impeach, but I am not sure I am happy with a precedent of political leaders going to the military and telling them to abrogate the constitutional authority that their political opponent has.
There are already other Constituional remedies such as impeachment or the 25th Amendment to deal with a rogue President. Telling the military to unilaterally assume authority in a matter is not one of them.
The military should Never be brought into any political dispute. That path only escalates and leads to ruin.
> We will never give up; we will never concede. We will stop the steal. We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol…We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones…the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
The certification by Congress is ceremonial, it's a counting of the results provided by the states, not an evaluation of those results.
There are established procedures for this process: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/explaining-how-congress-...
You'd almost think the law they wrote was intended to make it ceremonial, while reserving the capability to do something in the face of a real problem.
> And I would love to have if those tens of thousands of people would be allowed the military, the Secret Service and we want to thank you and the police and law enforcement great you're doing a great job, but I would love it if they could be allowed to come up with us. Is that possible? Can you just let them, please?
I do think was careless and even erroneous in many of his assertions but that is miles away from advocating for the violent overthrow of the government.
> And after this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down--
> We're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol--
> And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
> Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
> We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated.
Any evidence at all that this was a thing?
So far he has tweeted, initiated legal actions and abided by the rulings.
Where is your evidence that he will "do anything to stay in office"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/national-guar...
All it says in the letter is that she discussed the process with someone at the Pentagon.
The attempt by the President's supporters to overthrow Congress is a far better example.