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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Another story I can't validate, is that most of the EEC (at the time) agreed that if there was any attempt by NATO forces to arm and deploy the bombs held inside the european territory and they hadn't agreed, they'd seize them.

Basically, first-strike was a posture in public. The real question was "who commanded it"

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Conversely in the early days of NATO, the US nuclear command and control was aggressively re-engineered when it was realized that a 24 year old private on a European airbase with the keys to the arming mechanisms for the on-site nuclear bombs wasn't actually going to deter a European battlefield commander who believed he needed to use them right now.

Daniel Ellsberg was rather alarmed to find that Eisenhower had secretly delegated nuclear release capability to regional commanders who had then delegated authority to fairly low level commanders. This delegation wasn't removed when Kennedy became president.

Rhodes writes about earlier concern whose finger was on what button, iirc when Macarthur panicked about the Korean war and requested local tactical command.

I'd be interested in learning more about this - can you point me to any sources?

The Sandia National Labs youtube channel has some great documentaries on the history of US nuclear policy: the one I watched (of a few) was Always/Never: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4...

Which is kind of an oral history of the development of the current command and control systems (includes some great notes on things like "how unlikely the air force thought a mid-air collision of nuclear armed bombers was" - the spoiler is surprisingly more likely then it was thought after the second one happened).

Daniel Elllsberg's "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" covers this (and other related issues) in good detail.

https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-...

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