Well under the law the President is supposed to be the only person in the United States
who can authorize the use of a nuclear weapon.
But one of the challenges throughout the Cold War to the present day has been well what
if there’s an enemy attack and the President’s killed.
How do we retaliate with nuclear weapons?
So beginning in the Eisenhower administration the decision was made for the President to
pre-delegate his authority to use nuclear weapons to other officials down the chain
of command.
And that would mean that if the White House was destroyed and the President was killed
that there would be officers in the military who knew the codes and had the ability to
launch nuclear weapons in retaliation.
The problem becomes though with command and control how far down the line do you pre-delegate
that authority.
And if you give junior officers access to the codes what’s going to prevent them from
deciding on their own one day to just launch a few nuclear weapons.
And that sort of dilemma of maintaining presidential authority and also maintaining the ability
to retaliate has never been fully resolved.
The film Dr. Strangelove was brutally attacked by the Pentagon, by the Air Force when it
was released because the central plot element of Dr. Strangelove is that a crazed American
general is going to try and start World War III by ordering American bombers to attack
the Soviet Union without the President’s approval.
And the Pentagon said that was ridiculous and the Air Force said that was ridiculous
and that could never happen.
We now know as a result of declassified documents that the basic scenario of Dr. Strangelove
was entirely possible.
And it wasn’t until the early 1970s that there were any locks on our nuclear weapons
to prevent bomber crews or missile crews from using them.
Again, you know there was this concern during the Cold War that the President would be killed
and there’d be no way to use these weapons.
So as recently as 1970, 1971 if an American bomber crew on its own had decided to fly
to Moscow and bomb Moscow or an American bomber crew had decided to fly to Chicago and bomb
Chicago with nuclear weapons there was nothing physically to prevent them from doing it.
There was nothing physically to prevent missile officers from just turning their keys and
launching their missiles whenever they wanted to.
The only thing that stopped that was the professionalism and the discipline of our military forces.
And I give the military great credit for, you know, training their troops and training
their officers so that never happened.
But that’s an enormous responsibility and enormous power to be vested in officers who
are 23, 24, 25 years old.
And it only took during the Cold War in terms of our missiles two guys – if two guys in
their underground command center had decided hey, let’s nuke the Soviet Union there was
nothing to prevent those two guys working in concert from turning the keys and launching
their missiles.
So ideally you would not have the power to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of
people vested in two young guys.
And it’s still unnerving that the President of the United States, one man, one woman,
has the ability without a formal declaration of war to make a decision that could kill
millions of people.