A nuclear launch expert plays
out various scenarios.
By Bruce Blair
Donald Trump, Dec. 15, 2015: “The biggest problem we have is nuclear; nuclear proliferation, and having some maniac, some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”…
To a degree we haven’t seen, perhaps since the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, the question of Donald Trump’s temperament and judgment on matters of war and peace is stirring attention—and trepidation—particularly when the subject of nuclear weapons comes up. Some people believe that Trump himself is the maniac, the madman with nukes that appears in Trump’s own worst nightmare.…
In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. You might imagine this awesome executive power would be hamstrung with checks and balances, but by law, custom and congressional deference there may be no responsibility where the president has more absolute control. There is no advice and consent by the Senate. There is no second-guessing by the Supreme Court….
The “nuclear button” is a metaphor for a complex apparatus that has the president’s brain at its apex. The image of a commander-in-chief simply pressing a button captures none of the machinery, people, and procedures designed to inform the president and translate his or her decisions into coherent action. Although it remains shrouded in secrecy, we actually know a great deal about it, beginning with the president’s first task of opening the “nuclear suitcase” in an emergency to review his nuclear attack options.…
Let us say the president is awakened in the middle of the night (the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call) by his… top nuclear adviser and told of an incoming nuclear strike. Since the flight time of missiles fired from launch stations in Russia or China to the White House is 30 minutes, and 12 minutes or less for missiles fired from submarines lurking in the Western Atlantic Ocean… the steadiness and brainpower of the president in such circumstances are serious questions indeed….
This call has never happened.… The closest we came … occurred in 1979, when the consoles at our early-warning hub in Colorado lit up with indications of a large-scale Soviet missile attack. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, received back-to-back calls in the middle of the night informing him of the imminent nuclear destruction of the United States. The second call reported an all-out attack. Brzezinski was seconds away from waking Carter to pass on the dreadful news and convince him of the need to order retaliation without delay (within a six-minute deadline). Brzezinski was sure the end was near.
Just before he picked up the phone to call Carter, Brzezinski received a third call, this time canceling the alarm. It was a mistake caused by human and technical error. A training tape simulating an all-out Soviet attack had inadvertently slipped into the actual real-time attack early warning network. The impending nuclear holocaust was a mirage that confused the duty crew. (They were fired for taking eight minutes instead of the required three minutes to declare their degree of confidence that an attack against North America was underway.)
How would … President Trump behave under such duress, informed of the attack and the imminent destruction of the nation’s capital and himself? He would have only a few minutes to consider the reliability of the attack report and decide whether and how to retaliate. If the attack is real, and he hesitates, a president will likely be killed and the chain of command decapitated, perhaps permanently. …
The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons….
—Bruce Blair is a nuclear security expert and a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton. This excerpt is from a much longer article in Politico, June 11, 2016. See the full piece, and an analysis of statements made by Trump, here.
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