Perhaps, but it does run DOOM.
When did you go through training? I definitely got training — in basic and AIT, and later at two different NCO academy courses — on avoiding war crimes and the obligation to refuse orders to carry them out. Of course this was thoroughly muddled by the contrary message that you should follow orders, but at least it was there.
I think the difficulty of the war crimes argument with respect to nukes is that it isn’t clear to me how you judge whether your particular launch code order is a war crime or not. “Don’t murder everyone in the village” is pretty clear, but we bomb villages all the time, and people die, and we don’t treat that like murder.
That Russian dude who didn’t launch even though the automated systems swore up and down Reagan was coming for the Russian Bear with big missiles is today lauded as a hero, but he did lose his job and his career was kaput, if I remember correctly. That’s the usual course of action when an officer disobeys orders, standing or otherwise, because in their judgment the order is invalid for some reason. So at the very least, an officer has to be willing to trash their career hopes, if not risk worse, based on their understanding and conscience.
I say “officer” not because I think enlisted personnel are any less likely to see the problems or have moral doubts, but because as noted above the system tends to empower officers at decision points and trains enlisted personnel to function somewhat more automatically.
My personal suspicion is that if a launch order made it down to the level of individual silos for instance, it would have a high chance of being executed regardless of the circumstances. The place where things might be brought up short would somewhere in the middle of the chain I would imagine. And subs are in some ways I think (we have folks here who know a lot more about that than I do!) even more a special case, given the level of autonomy the officers on boomers have.
In the end though there’s fuck all we can do about it other than not elect megalomaniacal egoists to the Presidency.
Most definitely, I don’t think that anyone outside of Stratcom would be in a position to refuse an order. Stratcom (and the President) would also be the only people liable in a future war crimes trial, if it were to occur. You can’t expect the silo operators or submarine crews to know the full picture, they’re gonna follow orders. It is the group of people with the actual machinery to send out those “go” orders that are the final check and balance, and indeed can be liable for their decision making.
I think the legality part is 100% around a first strike event, on a country in which war was not declared, which would be the case if the president ordered an attack without consult to congress first. It is a really narrow scenario where I know that Stratcom would disobey an order, which makes sense, because it is a really narrow scenario where a president would launch a nuke on a whim. I think it comes down to, if the president does something stupid (like deciding to launch a nuke) Stratcom will follow suit and do something stupid (not follow orders).
