As US and South Korean war games continue apace, the extreme tension with North Korea - and the possibility of nuclear war - remains. So in the event of President Trump deciding that the ‘fire and fury’ moment has arrived, how would that be initiated? If the President is in the White House, then he would meet with senior defence staff in the Situation Room. But if the President is away from fixed command centres then he can avail himself of the mobile hub known as the nuclear football, without recourse to discussion with anyone else.
Carried by a military aide, the football carries the authentication codes which enable the President to order a nuclear attack. Before the order is carried out, it has to be verified as actually coming from the President. This is done by the Secretary of State for Defense, but although he or she has an essential role in declaring that the order is authentic, they cannot veto it. So the President has almost sole power to use nuclear weapons – an alarming prospect, if ever there was one, and this must presumably exercise the minds of those at the top of the US establishment.
But this is not the first time that this has been a very real concern. In 1974 when President Nixon resigned, not only had the football had already been removed from his side during his last hours in office, to remain with incoming president Gerald Ford; it was also subsequently revealed by Defense Secretary James Scheslinger that he had already issued orders to deal with an increasingly unstable president. As Garrett M. Graff wrote recently in Politico Magazine,
‘If the president gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him [Schlesinger] or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them. Schlesinger feared that the president, who seemed depressed and was drinking heavily, might order Armageddon. Nixon himself had stoked official fears during a meeting with congressmen during which he reportedly said, “I can go in my office and pick up a telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead.” Senator Alan Cranston had phoned Schlesinger, warning about “the need for keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust.”’
So there are ways of preventing an individual from wilfully ordering the destruction of the entire human race. Let’s hope a process is currently in place. Meanwhile it’s good to hear that US senators are pushing legislation that would limit the ability of an American president to use nuclear warheads unless the country had itself been attacked with such weapons. This is definitely a step in the right direction.
Reported in the Financial Times today, Democratic senator Edward Markey, said, “We’ve introduced legislation in the House [of Representatives] and Senate that would impose a restriction on President Trump, or any president, on the use of nuclear weapons if the United States has not been attacked by nuclear weapons.” Markey is currently in Seoul, leading a bipartisan delegation to discuss the threat from North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. He has described Trump’s “bluster” towards Pyongyang as counterproductive, adding: “We must acknowledge that a preventive war would not solve this problem, and it would make matters much, much worse.”
Never was a truer word spoken. This is something that our own government needs to understand and we must continue the pressure on Theresa May to back a diplomatic solution to this most dangerous of problems.
