Somewhere in the American southwest, not so very far from civilization, there is a fenced and guarded compound within another fenced and guarded compound in the distant reaches of a large military base. I won’t hint at its location, but it does show up on web searches if you know what to look for. Beneath the fence is a vault where nuclear weapons wait on transport dollies tended by highly trained technicians, each with Department of Energy “Q” security clearances, the ones that give the holder access to the deepest secrets of nuclear weapons. The techs have demonstrated that they are loyal, trustworthy and reliable Air Force members.
On any given day two of them may select a bomb and wheel it out of its cage to a large work room. Another pair of technicians attaches a harness to the city buster and uses a crane to lift the weapon by its tail until it hangs free. After carefully making certain that the weapon cannot possibly explode, they approach it as casually as a Maytag repairman working on a broken washer. They deftly replace components beyond their use-by dates, batteries and the like, and verify the bomb meets factory specs. The weapon is then buttoned up, lowered and two airmen return it to its storage location.
Two, always two, people. No unaccompanied person ever approaches a nuclear weapon. It’s a basic precaution against theft, misuse or sabotage and is not unique to the nuclear weapons world, nor to the United States.
Under the prairies of Montana or the Dakotas underground bunkers are buried adjacent to a bomb-proof silo containing a Minuteman intercontinental missile. Two Air Force officers occupy two somewhat shabby chairs mounted so that an atomic blast won’t eject their occupants. In front of each officer is a lock. Each launch officer carries a key. The locks are spaced so that one person cannot possibly turn both keys within the few seconds the computer will allow. But if both keys turn simultaneously, a blast door swings out of the ground, and the Minuteman missile leaves its silo on a one way trip. It takes two people at every step, from decoding the message that rattles in on the teletype machine, to checking its contents for the authentication message, to making final adjustments.
Somewhere under the ocean a missile submarine receives a message. The captain and his executive officer separately decode and authenticate it.
It always requires two people, two separate actions, to launch, steal, sabotage or tinker with an atomic warhead. This is the inviolable two person rule intended to prevent misuse of a nuclear weapon. It has been that way since the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was loaded into the Enola Gay to force an end to World War II.
But the system deliberately breaks down at the single point where failure would be catastrophic. Only one person need act in order to launch all American nuclear weapons. The president. There is no two-person rule for ordering a strike. Nobody except the president needs to agree; nobody in the chain from president to launch officer has authority to question the order. If the president orders a launch, the system executes it. The service members involved may have their doubts, but years of military training have conditioned them that even this order must be obeyed.
Since 1941 American strategic thinking has been held hostage to the memory of Pearl Harbor. The Roosevelt Administration and the Japanese government were in negotiations to settle their disputes peacefully, but even while his emissaries were talking in Washington the Japanese emperor’s aircraft carriers were turning into the wind to launch the bombers that would sink many warships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The U.S. Navy was left practically disarmed in just half an hour or so.
The United States vowed that never again would a potential enemy be able to launch a surprise attack to which this country could not respond instantly and in kind.
This made sense during the height of the Cold War when the United States, terrified by the prospect of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, sought to ensure that a counter strike could not be thwarted by a clumsy decision-making process that would require more time than the country expected to have. A missile from a submarine hiding off our East Coast could destroy Washington less than 12 minutes after its launch.
A satellite or a radar would spot the missile. The president would be told that one or more nuclear missiles was heading our way. A field-grade officer toting the portable nuclear launch control system, the “football,” would show the president his options, and the president would pull out his credit card-like authenticator, the “biscuit,” select his response from a menu, give the order, and use the biscuit to prove his identity. Everything else is automatic, and there is no legal way to countermand or stop its execution.
At least twice the Soviet Union and the United States have come very close to launching nuclear weapons based on the warnings provided by radar and satellite systems. A Soviet officer did not pass a notification of a rocket launch to the Kremlin at a time he knew that tensions between the powers were minimal. A good thing; it was not a nuclear missile but a small scientific rocket launched from a Norwegian island and carrying an innocent payload. The Soviets had been notified in advance of the launch, but somehow the message was lost.
Bad weather has sometimes fooled American defenses into thinking that a flight of geese was actually a nuclear missile, and only good judgment stopped the alert in its tracks. But human intervention is only legal going up the chain to the president. It’s ruled out if the president sends down a message ordering a launch, even if he or she is mistaken.
Nor is there any way at all to stop a drunk president, an angered and offended president, an insane one, or merely a bored and curious one from simply ordering the opening of the football and the launch of one or more nuclear weapons. This is true for all presidents. My argument is not intended to single out the current president as less reliable than his predecessors; it is equally applicable to every person with a finger on the button, past or future as well as present.
If it were still plausible that nuclear catastrophe could come as a bolt from the blue, a massive launch by another country when the world is generally at peace and no flash points active, maybe the hair trigger still in place would make sense.
However, it is clear that the Pentagon no longer believes in a nuclear Pearl Harbor.
During the Cold War the U.S. had several ways to ensure that an order to launch would get through, and that if there were no one left alive in Washington to give the order, a flag or general officer could still launch missiles and fight a war. “The Looking Glass” aircraft, a heavily modified Boeing 707, slowly orbited high above the central United States. In the event of nuclear war, and if the president was out of contact for a (top secret) period, the airborne commander would open his sealed orders and take charge of a nuclear response previously selected by the president. The Glass was airborne 24/7, 365 days a year, without a break from February 3, 1961 until July 24, 1990 when the last continuous airborne command mission landed at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The planes remain, the mission to assume command in case of nuclear catastrophe still formally exists, but the aircraft normally sit on the ground.
The Navy had a similar plan. The TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out) aircraft could order the launch of submarine-based missiles. TACAMO and Looking Glass missions have been combined; neither mission is on constant airborne alert.
Today, the United States does not even contemplate a nuclear Pearl Harbor; if it did, Looking Glass and TACAMO would still be flying. The truth lies in operations, not declarations.
The leaders of North Korea might launch their missiles, but for the foreseeable future they can’t reach our command centers. And in any event, for many years to come they will have too few weapons to decapitate our government. Still other potential nuclear proliferators, Iran perhaps, might conceivably threaten a nuclear attack. But again they will not be capable of immobilizing our deterrent forces. Both Russia and China could strike at our forces, but both would almost certainly give political warning that our relations had deteriorated to where a war was plausible.
Nobody in authority believes that the president will have to order a nuclear strike in a matter of minutes. Time for consultation will certainly exist. There is no reason to take the risk that an unstable president could order up nuclear holocaust acting alone or that the commander in chief could misread warnings and stumble into war. It is time to change the law and procedures to provide a legal path to stop a rogue launch.
The goal is to ensure that no single person, acting on his or her sole authority, should be able to launch nuclear weapons. An essential part of the solution is that there is at least one person with the power to veto a launch who is not within the president’s inner circle and not subject to his pressure and even charisma.
There are many new laws and procedures that could achieve that goal; some are simple in concept – the secretary of defense could be authorized to become a “circuit breaker” to thwart a misguided launch order. Others may be too complex to implement in real life, for example requiring consultation with the Congressional leaders. And still others may be too complicated to enact in law or regulations. Some have suggested that the Cabinet be polled; and still other scholars advocate a three-man rule. It is a political question for our elected officials to decide with public input.
But the president and the Congress must work together now, ignoring partisanship, to prevent an accidental, or even an intentional nuclear holocaust. It is time to extend the two person rule to the top of the pyramid, so that not even the president can start a nuclear war alone.
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