Never forget that Trump has the nuclear codes
One unhinged man has the power to destroy the world. Sleep tight!
The psychic hero of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone meets Greg Stillson, a bombastic populist politician, and has a premonition about him being elected President and launching America’s nuclear arsenal. (Martin Sheen played Stillson in David Cronenberg’s movie version, a far cry from The West Wing.)
America actually elected Greg Stillson in 2016. (If someone did try to assassinate Trump, I can guarantee you he’d try to use a baby as a human shield.) Thankfully he’s been too busy watching TV to actually launch a nuclear attack, but Claire Berlinski reminds us that he has pretty much unchallenged power to do so.
Have a nice day!
When all of this is over, many years from now, we will find out, I am sure—in the finest of ironies—that the Deep State saved us. I have to imagine—I must imagine, I’d go mad otherwise—that some kind of secret protocol has been worked out in the Pentagon. It cannot be true that we are following the letter of the law on this, the gravest of matters, the most sacrosanct of national duties, of awesome responsibility, the arena in which the law most matters—and yet.
The law says the President alone has the sole power to launch nuclear weapons. The policy dates from Truman, who sought to ensure the military would never have the option to use these monstrous instruments. Instead, one man alone would have the power to destroy the world. Truman, mistakenly, had more faith in the American people to choose a President who understood his evil power than he did the military.
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it’s good to know every link in the decision chain has safeguards against poor judgment, deliberate misuse, and accidental deployment. For example, the launch order must be sent to two people. Each of them must independently decode and authenticate the message before acting. Everyone with nuclear weapons duties—in every branch of service—must, routinely, pass a battery of tests—the Personnel Reliability Program—that assess his or her mental fitness, financial history, health, and emotional stability.
Except the President.
Trump could not conceivably pass that test.
This is the law. The authority is inherent in the President’s Constitutional role as Commander in Chief. Only the President is authorized to make the decision to use a nuclear weapon, and he is fully authorized. He is not required to consult his advisors. He does not need their concurrence. He is not required to ask the Defense Department. He need not consult Congress. Congress cannot overrule him. The judicial branch cannot lawfully restrain him. Not one single Constitutional office holder need be consulted before the President orders a nuclear strike. That is the law.
A military aide is always by the President’s side. He carries the Presidential Emergency Satchel—the so-called football. In the football, there is the Black Book. It contains strike options, classified locations, and the Emergency Broadcast System procedures.
There is a small card, about the size of a credit card. That is the so-called biscuit. The President carries the Biscuit with him at all times. On the biscuit are the codes, unique to the President, that the identify him to military officials at the Pentagon. Using these codes, the President transmits the launch orders to the Pentagon and STRATCOM.
When the President authorizes a nuclear strike, the Defense Department is not authorized to ask, “Is this a good idea?” It is only authorized to ensure the codes are correct. As the former director of the CIA and the NSA, General Michael Hayden, has noted: The system “is designed for speed and decisiveness. It’s not designed to debate the decision.” Hayden is voting for Biden, by the way.
Once the order is transmitted to the war room, it is executed within a minute. The orders are carried out by launch crews. There are two in a crew. The land-based Minutemen fire in two minutes. The submarines fire in 15 minutes. There is no way to reverse the order. There is no way to recall the missiles once they have launched. There is no self-destruct switch.
It takes thirty minutes, or less, from the time the President orders a strike for the nuclear weapons to reach their target. Within five minutes of the initial order, some 400 land-based nuclear weapons could be loosed on enemy targets. Ten minutes later, a battalion of underwater nukes could join them.
The President can—all by himself—unleash thermonuclear Armageddon.
Even if only one nuclear weapon were launched—and no matter where it landed—it is all but certain that retaliatory attacks would follow. That is why the scenario is called mutually assured destruction.
Trump has already shown that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans leaves him stone cold. It is what it is.
Even with a normal president, the risks are too high. The risk of mistaken launch based on false warning, human error in control systems, or panic are very real. They’ve brought us near to the very end of the world more than once.
But Trump is absolutely fucking nuts.
The chance that Trump, who once mused about using nuclear weapons against hurricanes, would actually do this is small. Really small. But it’s not zero.
And now that I’ve raised the possibility of Trump starting a nuclear war, let me shift gears and praise him for helping bring about peace in the Middle East.
Jeff Jacoby discusses the significance of Sudan joining some other majority-Muslim countries in normalizing relations with Israel:
A few weeks after Israel’s stunning triumph in the Six Day War, the Arab League met in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to lick its wounds and reassert its hostility toward the small Jewish state it had tried but failed to destroy.
During the war, Israel managed not only to beat back a joint attack by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, but also to conquer territory from all three — Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) from Jordan. Israeli leaders made clear that they were ready to trade nearly all of that land in exchange for an end to the Arab countries’ antagonism and the establishment of normal relations.
“Israel is waiting for a phone call from the Arabs,” said the country’s defense minister and popular military hero, Moshe Dayan. Foreign Minister Abba Eban added that it would be worth their while to make that call, for Israel was prepared to be “unbelievably generous in working out peace terms.” If the Arabs would agree to direct talks, said Eban, “everything is negotiable.”
But the Khartoum summit dashed any hope of peace. In a communiqué issued on Sept. 1, 1967, the eight heads of state attending the summit issued what came to be known as the Three No’s of Khartoum: the “main principles by which the Arab States abide,” it declared, were “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”
Sudan thus became a symbol of the Arab world’s rejectionism — its implacable refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Sudan itself had never been a frontline combatant in the wars against Israel, but it had sent troops to fight alongside Egyptian forces during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, and it had done so again during the Six Day War.[…]
…there is a palpable sense that a page of history has been turned. Sudan’s Foreign Minister Omar Qamar al-Din said that while formal ratification of the new agreement will unfold slowly, Friday’s announcement ends the state of hostility with Israel, and will lead to diplomatic, political, and economic benefits. “We need Israel,” the vice-chairman of Sudan’s sovereign council told a TV interviewer. “Israel is a developed country and the whole world is working with it.”
Among those welcoming the new peace agreement was Egypt, until now the only Arab nation in Africa to have established normal diplomatic ties with Israel. “I welcome the joint efforts of the United States, Sudan, and Israel to normalize relations between Sudan and Israel,” tweeted Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. “I value all efforts aimed at establishing regional peace and stability.”
Together with Sudan, Egypt was a signatory to the “Three No’s” of 1967. Now, more than half a century later, Sudan becomes the third “Yes” of 2020. Who would have imagined that in a year roiled by so much bad news, tidings of great joy — of peace on earth and goodwill to men — would be flowing from the Middle East?
There are some people who support Israel so strongly, they’ll overlook Trump’s many failures and support him. There are others who’ve traditionally supported the Jewish state but hate Trump so much they can’t even grudgingly support Israel making peace with some of its hostile neighbors.
As for me, this certainly wouldn’t make me support his re-election. Not even close. But even the worst leaders can occasionally do something good. (I mean, say what you will about Adolf Hitler, but he did kill Adolf Hitler, right?)
Via reddit, the most accurate political compass yet. My politics generally range from Obama to Shinzo Abe.
Even as a 9-year-old, I was palpably aware of the constant possibility of nukes from the US and Russia destroying my family in the middle. It was just a fact that someday, any day, we could be vaporized before we even had time to become aware of it.
If that doesn’t get a kid to turn to philosophy, nothing will.
If Biden is elected and becomes President without incident - and we won’t truly know what will happen until it does, because we think like normal persons and therefore cannot adequately imagine what might come to life in Trump’s head - the US will have a chance to remake itself in very important ways. Their elections system. Their Supreme Court appointments for life. The unchecked power of mass destruction given to a single person in the full knowledge that humans are fallible and decisions made under stress are more subject to human error.
Maybe US citizens will realize that they had a really close call and make a better country.
But it’s not over yet. The fact that there is even a chance of Trump getting another four years (and who’s to say he will stop there) should make Americans think very hard about what they are willing to fight for.