In 2008, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview on Fox News, offered the following unnerving assessment of the president’s sole authority over our nuclear arsenal: “He 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.”
We ask voters, especially those who are undecided or thinking about sitting out the election, to consider a single question (and keep in mind the wrong answer could be catastrophic): Which presidential candidate is fit to authorize the use of nuclear weapons?
“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,” Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear security expert and a research scholar at Princeton, wrote in Politico. It is akin, Blair said, to a “nuclear monarchy.”
There is a “two person” rule in the nuclear arms world. Two people have to turn the launch key, and two people are present for all maintenance. But the rule doesn’t apply at the top, where the president, as commander in chief, has absolute authority to launch a nuclear attack – in defense or as a first strike.
“It’s an amazing fact of the nuclear age that there is this unbelievable power,” professor Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear weapons at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told us this week.
For that reason, in choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the issue is temperament.
During his real campaign – before chief spin doctor Kellyanne Conway got a hold of him – we saw plenty of Trump’s arrogance (“I know more about ISIS than the generals”), his ego (“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”) and his knowledge of foreign affairs (“my primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”)
Is this a person who should be in position to decide the fate of the planet?
As the New York Times reported recently, if it appeared our country was facing a nuclear attack, the president would have to decide in minutes whether the threat was real, and then whether to launch nuclear weapons.
The Times said it would take just 12 minutes for nuclear weapons launched from a submarine to strike Washington, D.C. There would be little time for discussion – the need for fast decision-making, to avoid Armageddon, underlies the president’s sole authority.
In choosing a president, voters need to look for someone “with sober judgment who would handle a crisis without increasing the risks,” said Bunn, a former White House adviser. He points to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – the closest we have come to nuclear confrontation – when President Kennedy insisted, under intense pressure, that “there has to be another way” when all of his advisers pushed for air strikes in response to the Soviet buildup of nuclear missile sites. Cooler heads prevailed.
That said, in a world full of nuclear dangers – consider North Korea – would you rather have a president with experience in national security crises? Or in real estate bankruptcies?
The Times, and others, have resurrected a 1984 Washington Post story in which Trump, then a brash, 38-year-old real estate developer, said he wanted to negotiate nuclear deals with the Soviet Union. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. . . . I think I know most of it anyway, ” he said.
He just had to get updated on the situation, Trump told the Post. Now he wants to be president.