This ended up being part one of a three part arc: Part I (in which I introduce the question), Part III (in which I talk about some "new" discoveries)

It's been a busy month; aside from "regular work" sorts of duties (teaching, grading, writing, e-mailing, programming, book reviews, grant proposals, oh my!), I've been sucked into various discussions relating to presidential command and control after my last post, which got me a solicitation to write an op-ed for the Washington Post on presidential authority to launch nuclear weapons. I haven't really gotten around to screening all the comments to my blog post, and Post piece has 1,200 comments that I'm just not going to bother trying to wade into. I thought though that I would post a few quick responses here to common comments I've gotten on both pieces.

Both pieces are about the history and policy of presidential authorization to use nuclear weapons. In a nutshell, in the United States the President and only the President is the ultimate source of authority on the use of nukes. This is entirely uncontroversial, and the articles describe the history behind the situation.

The trickier questions come up when you ask, can anyone stop nuclear weapons from being used if the president wants to use them? Everything I've been able to find suggests that the answer is no, but there are ambiguities that various people interpret differently. For example, there are two separate questions hidden in that first one: can anyone legally stop the president, and can anyone practically stop the president? I will get into these below.

The most curious response that I've heard, both in person and second-hand, are people who have heard what I've said about this, and say, "that can't be true, that would be a dumb/crazy way to set things up." This is often a purely emotional response, not one based on any research or specialized knowledge — a pure belief that the US would have a "smarter" system in place. I find it interesting because it is a curious way to just reject the whole topic, some sort of mental defense mechanism. Again, everything I've found suggests that this is how the system is set up, and in both the blog post and the Post article I've tried to outline the history of how it got to be this way, which I think makes it more understandable, even if it's still (arguably) not a great idea.

And, of course, because it featured the name "Trump," a somewhat hyperbolic headline (which I didn't write, but don't really hate — it elides some caveats and ambiguities, but it's a headline, not the article), and is in the Washington Post, there were a lot of people who wondered whether this was just a partisan attack. And amusingly had a number of people accuse me of being a Post employee, which I am decidedly not. My writing has also been sometimes referred to as "hysterical," which is an interesting form of projection; to my eye, anyway, it is intentionally pretty sober, but I suppose we see what we expect to see, to some degree.

It's true that I think this issue is particularly acute with regards to Mr. Trump; if nuclear war powers are vested in the person of the executive, then the personality of the executive is thus extremely important. And I think even his supporters would agree that he has a reactive, volatile, unpredictable personality. He broadcasts his thin-skinnedness to the world on a daily basis. And a president who complains on a weekly basis on his portrayal on Saturday Night Live is, let's be straight, thin-skinned. To be offended by comedic parody is beneath the station of the job, something that any American president had better get beyond.

But frankly I would be just as happy to have been talking about this in a Clinton administration, and would have been happy to talk about it during the Obama administration. The issue, and my position, still stands: I think that vesting such power in one human being, any human being, is asking a lot. And this has nothing to do with how reliable they seem at election-time: we have historical instances of presidents who had health problems (Wilson), were heavy users of painkillers (Kennedy) or alcohol (Nixon), or who were later discovered to be in the early stages of mental decline (Reagan). There is no reason to suspect that the president you elect one year will continue to be that person two or three years later, or that they will be totally reasonable at all times. And I don't think anyone of any political party in the USA would go out on a limb to suggest that the US electorate will always elect someone whose can bear all that responsibility. So this doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be, a partisan issue, even if Trump in particular is getting a lot of people to start talking about it again.

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