Stephen Kinzer: It's Far too Easy for Donald Trump to Start Nuclear War
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/08/18/far-too-easy-for-donald-trump-start-nuclear-war/w6xhPtWuOidBtquVWujvJP/story.htmlIt’s far too easy for Donald Trump to start a nuclear war
By Stephen Kinzer AUGUST 18, 2017
Wherever the President of the United States travels, a military
aide-de-camp carrying “the football” is just a few steps away. It
isn’t the kind Tom Brady throws. In the laconic jargon that national
security officers use, “the football” is a briefcase that allows the
President to launch a nuclear attack.
These days “the football” seems closer to being used than at any time
in the last half-century. President Trump has issued thinly veiled
threats of a nuclear first strike against North Korea. His emotional
volatility makes those threats terrifying. Because of a deep flaw in
our legal order, this is an existential fear rather than a theoretical
one.
American law allows the President to launch a nuclear strike on the
basis of nothing more than his own impulse. He need not provide any
reason or consult anyone else. Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to
salivate when he described the breadth of a president’s authority to
incinerate nations.
“The president,” Cheney told an interviewer in 2008, “could launch a
kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen. He doesn’t have to
check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t
have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the
nature of the world we live in.”
Framers of our Constitution, acutely aware of how monarchs and tyrants
had misused their authority, took great pains to limit presidential
power. Thanks to their foresight, presidents may not declare war or
levy taxes. They may name cabinet secretaries and ambassadors only
with the consent of the Senate. The Supreme Court may reject laws they
sign. Their freedom to act is remarkably limited.
The framers could not have imagined the apocalyptic power of nuclear
weapons. Recent events make clear that this is the gaping hole in our
system of checks and balances. President Trump cannot remove a local
school board member, but if the impulse should strike him while he is
relaxing at Mar-a-Lago, or if he is seized by anger when awoken and
informed of some violent provocation in a distant land, he can call
for “the football.” Nuclear weapons would be in the air within
minutes.
“I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would
be dead,” President Richard Nixon told members of Congress in 1973.
Was he considering it? Was he joking? Was he drunk? None of that
matters. The key fact is that he was correct. Secretary of Defense
James Schlesinger, according to later reports, became so concerned
about Nixon’s mental health that he ordered officers in the nuclear
chain of command to check with him before following any “unusual
orders.” Trusting that today’s Pentagon is similarly engaged is a leap
of faith.
The Nixon experience might have led Congress to impose some limit on
the ability of presidents to set off nuclear war. It did not. Today
the challenge is more urgent than ever. President Trump has asserted
that he is prepared to set off horror “the likes of which the world
has never seen before.” That should focus attention on the reality
that under American law, this single individual has the right to
launch a nuclear war.
It would be a horror without precedent. The atomic bomb attacks on
Japan in 1945 were of an entirely different magnitude. Nuclear weapons
of that era were primitive by modern standards. More important, Japan
had no nuclear weapons with which to retaliate. Attacking North Korea
would likely set off a holocaust.
President Harry Truman, who ordered the bombing of Japan, was not
required to seek approval from anyone before doing so. Nonetheless he
did. Truman wanted to assure himself that others with more experience
and expertise shared his belief that a nuclear attack on Japan was
justified. He secretly created what he called the Interim Committee —
so named because it was established to make only a single
recommendation — and asked for its opinion. Secretary of War Henry
Stimson was the chairman. Its other members were the president of
Harvard, the president of MIT, and senior representatives of military
and security agencies. The Interim Committee reviewed intelligence and
interviewed physicists who had developed the nuclear bomb, including
Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. After three weeks of
deliberation, it advised Truman that it agreed with his decision to
attack.
Some in Washington, shaken by President Trump’s rhetoric, are seeking
to restrict his power to launch a unilateral nuclear attack. Nine
members of the House of Representatives have filed a bill called the
Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act. Its principle is not
new, but in recent weeks it has taken on a new urgency. Under its
provisions, presidents would be allowed to launch a nuclear first
strike only after Congress has declared war and authorized such a
strike. One of the co-sponsors, Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon,
asserted that since “Trump has already threatened nuclear war,”
Congress needs “tools to prevent him from stumbling into the
destruction and utter annihilation of millions of lives.”
Congress has not shown even the courage to limit a president’s power
to wage conventional war. Determined to avoid responsibility for major
national security decisions, it allowed wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan to rage for years without fulfilling its constitutional
duty to declare or refuse to declare war. Congress is unlikely
suddenly to grow a spine and assert its right to play a role in making
what could be the most consequential war-or-peace decision in world
history.
Questioning the president’s power to launch a nuclear first strike can
be dangerous. During a training session in 1973 — when Nixon was at
his most volatile — an officer posted at Vandenberg Air Force Base in
California asked what may have seemed a reasonable question: “How can
I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane
president?” The answer came quickly. The inquiring officer, Major
Harold Hering, was discharged from the Air Force for “failure to
demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership.” He became a truck
driver.
Can there be any restraint if presidents refuse to consult something
like Truman’s Interim Committee, if Congress will not act, and if the
military considers it taboo to question how it should respond to an
order from a berserk president? During the 1980s Roger Fisher, a
pre-eminent expert on conflict resolution, offered a provocative
answer.
“Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant
that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer,” Fisher
suggested. “The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher
knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to
fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him
first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. . . He has to look
at someone and realize what death is — what an innocent death is.
Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.”
More than 200 years ago, James Madison wrote that consolidating power
in the hands of a single leader “may justly be pronounced the very
definition of tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson asserted that the only way to
avoid such tyranny was to elect a leader and then “bind him down from
mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” They and the other
Founders took pains to assure that no president would ever be able to
order arbitrary arrests, unfair trials, or suppression of public
liberty. If they could have imagined the power of nuclear weapons,
they certainly would have taken a comparable precaution. Giving one
individual the power to set off nuclear war would have been abhorrent
to the framers of our Constitution. Limiting that power would honor
their memory while increasing the odds for humanity’s survival.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
--
Cole Harrison
rozziecole@gmail.com617-466-9274 (rings home & cell)
Facebook: facebook.com/rozziecole
Twitter: rozziecole
LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/coleharrison--
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