I thought this was an interesting, and scary, article from NYT. Pretty effective use of scrolling, too. Gifted link.
I’m pretty sure the whole world wrestled with this idea during Trump’s many tantrums during his presidency.
It’s mentioned in there. Also, that folks were concerned about Nixon because he was drunk and depressed towards the end of his Presidency – which I did not know.
Thanks for sharing the gift link, it was an interesting read, and well put together.
I think the stuff that makes it less scary is that the President doesn’t have a launch button. He is surrounded by people that would be able to prevent a first strike happening. It is supposed to be black/white and binary decision making, but there are so many people in the process that could step in and stop it.
The idea of a president on a whim starting a nuclear first strike attack is just fantasy, no matter how much politicians from either side would like to sell that idea.
This came up during the Trump presidency, and former Stratcom generals said that it was known that they could refuse a presidential order if they deemed the circumstances were not correct. And the head of Stratcom specifically said that they would deny an order that they thought would be illegal.
Gen Hyten argued that if a nuclear order was illegal, he wouldn’t carry it out.
“If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.”
The US Department of Defense acknowledges in its law manual that “the law of war governs the use of nuclear weapons”.
Prof Colangelo says the responsibility to obey the law “runs from the top down - right down to the crew member on the submarine”.
If the president orders an illegal strike, anyone who carries out that order is potentially liable for war crimes.
The international community has been pretty clear that “I was following orders” is not an excuse for committing war crimes.
So, while the president truly does have the sole authority to issue orders for use of nuclear weapons, he has to rely on generals and soldiers to execute those orders, who will be put on trial for their decision making in their part of the attack, and they might not be so gung ho about being tried at the Hague and executed for committing a war crime.
This is fantasy. Not that it should be fantasy, you know, but the only way these people get tried and executed at The Hague is after the US loses a war on its own soil. And the US isn’t going to lose a war because nobody who could conceivably do that could get there. Nobody is worrying they’re going to be executed for following illegal orders. They’re worried that they’ll start WW3 with China and Russia and they and everyone and everything they care about will be destroyed.
Indeed. George W Bush and other members of his administration were found liable for war crimes, including torture and rendition, by the International Criminal Court and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and will never be held to account for them.
How would you even define an illegal order when it comes to a nuclear strike? Imagine that President Trump gets a confidential briefing that Iran has finalized the construction of a nuclear missile and he decides to solve the problem once and for all with a few nukes.
Is that an illegal order? To me that is well within his power as Commander-in-Chief.
I think a central lunacy of the late 20th century is that we decided the safest way to have nuclear weapons was to invest the power to use them in a single person. I’d waaaayyyyy prefer it be a committee.
I wouldn’t count on lower-level troops to stop a nuclear war. The decision will ultimately be a strategic and political one and the rank-and-file executing those orders are so far removed from the decision making that they cannot reliably be asked to make those kinds of on-the-spot vetting. This isn’t a “go burn this village and murder everyone” type of order that can easily be seen as illegal. Turning the key or relaying the comms to nuke a place will be one order out of hundreds in the process from President on down.
The calculus for disobeying an unlawful order depends on the soldier making the decision to endure the immediate punishment of disobeying weighed against the hoped for exoneration based on what you think is unlawful. If you don’t have the strategic data, you cannot make that decision.
But even top officials have publicly admitted that it’s unclear how, exactly, a refusal to execute a presidential order might work. C. Robert Kehler, a retired Air Force general who once commanded Stratcom, tried to assure Congress in 2017 that there are internal checks in place if a president orders an illegal first strike without prior deliberations and warnings. Kehler said he wouldn’t proceed if a president issued a direct order to execute such a launch. When asked what would happen next, he replied: “Well, as I say — I don’t know exactly. Fortunately, we’ve never — these are all hypothetical scenarios.”
Or to put it another way, imagine disobeying the order to nuke because you think you know better, then a bunch of enemy nukes strike the country and now you’re staring down the gun (figuratively and probably literally) of an insubordination charge for disobeying a lawful order.
Also, just to put it out there, Wargames really did a number on the public perception of how nukes work. The writer(s) of the movie weren’t the first to stumble on the idea that the “key turners” might disobey the order to nuke another country. Our government knew and planned for that almost immediately. You get soldiers to execute the order to nuke just like you do all kinds of distasteful or exhausting tasks. You drill it into them. You do it every day. You make it rote. In fact, you make it annoying. The thought that enters that guy’s head when he’s told to turn the key isn’t going to be “Oh no! This may be a war crime!” He’s gonna think, “Ugh. Not again. The quicker we get through this, the faster I can get back to eating my lunch.”
What exactly is the difference?
There are other calculations one might make:
One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly . . . and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.
The difference is that I as a soldier told to burn a village and kill everybody would have the knowledge of history in my mind. Mai Lai is literally the example every soldier is taught.
Well, you can literally make that argument about any outcome after the fact. This is the decision stratcom will have to make. I think that the worry is that an unhinged president would get launch happy, not some super specific plausible scenario.
I think that people worry about the president making a rash decision to first strike a country on a lie. Stratcom will have the ability to know better, they would be the best informed actually, and if the information they have is contradicting the president, they could decide not to follow through.
If there truly were nuclear weapons in the air coming our way, IDGAF because it is over anyway.
I was taught to follow orders. I never ever got a “let your conscience guide you” speech or “Mai Lai is the instructive example of when insubordination is justified.” It was literally “insubordination in wartime is a capital offense.”, i.e. do what you’re told or get shot.
I mostly mean in effect though; a village burned and murdered is burned and murdered regardless if done with gasoline and rifles or with a nuke. That village might have been hiding an IED factory or a terrorist cell.
We got both during our training.
A true mixed message for sure!
That just sounds like, you’ll do what you’re told, and it’s still your fault.
I think at the time they weren’t really considering the possibility that you could have a lunatic for President, and were primarily focused on being able to have a decision and response in the time between the Soviets launching and the warheads hitting.
The other thing that the military will have to grapple with is whether a message on Truth Social constitutes a valid, legal order.
This, to a degree, is every job working for someone.
I personally haven’t served, but have friends who had, and they talked about the mixed messages you recieve, especially in the Afghanistan conflict, where orders would contradict or come close to conflict with the ROE and you didn’t really know what you would do if things went sideways.
It truly is a really difficult thing to give young men that kind of power and expect them to know what to do with it, which is why you have to drill in the order following, the decisions are for those higher up, you just have to pray they don’t make bad ones.
Karl Marlantes talked about his experiences in Vietnam, as an officer in training at Oxford choosing to drop out to join active combat as a decision he made because he heard about the horrible things going on, and he thought it was his duty to get his marines through the war alive, without doing some of the awful stuff you had read about. He wanted to ensure that they were getting the right orders
Well, yes, after the executive order which mandates all federal employees register and follow his Truthness on his own media site.
I imagine it is pretty difficult to install TruthSocial on the nuclear football.