Nuclear Command Authority: Rethink Needed if Trump II Happens

by Prof. Louis Rene Beres

“The man who laughs has simply not yet heard the horrible news.”

     Berthold Brecht

An Existential Task

Until the end of his presidency – and even after his open complicity in subverting the United States Constitution on January 6, 2021 – Donald J. Trump held effectively unchecked nuclear command authority. Now, after multiple criminal indictments, this former president seeks a return to the White House. His candidacy has a distinctly real chance of success.

Credo quia absurdum, warned the ancient political philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.”

In explanation, details will matter. These details, both legal and political, would be determinative. For Americans, there can be no more serious or perplexing issues than presidential nuclear command authority and existential risk management.

But the facts are plain. Never in its history did this “nation of laws” countenance a leader who so eagerly embraced the “high crimes” of “seditious conspiracy.” Now, with a previously repressed candor, “We the people” should finally inquire: “What does this criminal embrace mean for The Republic, especially in such conspicuously fragile times of global nuclear instability”? Significantly, with the July 2023 film release of “Oppenheimer,” and the ongoing Iran-mentored war in Gaza, normally esoteric obligations of nuclear war avoidance have been brought up front and center.

There is more. Various subsidiary questions should now be considered. “In what specific nuclear policy directions should Americans now position themselves?” Looking ahead to more-or-less inevitable US nuclear crises with North Korea, China, Russia, and prospectively Iran, Trump-era derelictions could hasten irremediable harm to the United States. For the moment, interested Americans remain most visibly absorbed in Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine, but this egregious “crime against peace” could sometimes be worsened by various parallel crises involving North Korea and/or China.

It will take a very capable American president to deal with several ongoing Russian-created crises. In March 2023, Moscow halted all information exchanges with Washington that had been part of the New START treaty. Vladimir Putin suspended this last-remaining nuclear arms treaty because the US and its NATO allies openly declared their support for Ukraine against Russian military aggression. Simultaneously, Putin declared his plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. This more open reliance upon theatre nuclear forces stemmed from Russia’s starkly different doctrinal view of operational nuclear war thresholds.

Whatever eventually happens in Ukraine and Belarus – and this could include a reciprocal American/NATO deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Poland – the always-unpredictable world of geopolitics will remain mired in a “state of nature.”Inter alia, to survive within this bitterly corrosive state, the United States will require a president who can meet the inherently steep expectations of nuclear command authority. Together with appropriate advisors, this president should be capable of very intricate kinds of dialectical reasoning and, if necessary, to display such capacities in extremis.

What about the US nuclear war command authority?

An Intellectual Imperative

How could the former president’s witting indifference to nuclear doctrine and nuclear strategy have passed muster with We the People? It was, after all, the reductio ad absurdum of Donald Trump’s unambitious “intellectual life.” Today, North Korea is expanding and accelerating its nuclear-related missile tests and applicable infrastructures. It seems that Pyongyang’s nuclear program was not deeply impacted by Trump’s clumsy declarations of “love” for North Korea’s supreme leader.

If America’s battered citizens have learned anything from the history of modern world politics – from the “balance of power” that was put into place after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – it is that any continuously unregulated system of competitive anarchy and “escalation dominance” leads to war and civilizational breakdown. Though President Trump proudly favored “attitude” over “preparation,” far more serious analytic thought deserves pride of place in the United States. A persistently unwinding “state of nature,” a global condition built upon intermittent aggression, rancor, and belligerent nationalism, has never succeeded. Even more ominously, this Hobbesian “state of war” displays no tangible signs of enhanced durability.

Understanding Decisional Hazards

Serious questions continue to mount. What specific nuclear hazards now present themselves to the United States? To begin, it should finally be recognized that an inappropriate or irrational nuclear command decision by an American president is neither science fiction nor apocalyptic delusion. It is integral to the credible “texts” of history, logic, science, and mathematics.

Such a command decision is certainly conceivable. Though nothing conclusive can ever be said about the precise mathematical probability of any such fearful scenario, there remain ample reasons for concern. After Trump (and possibly before Trump II), these reasons are evident and unambiguous.

There is more. In world politics, nothing ever happens ex nihilo. Americans should therefore inquire: “Might another unsteady, lawless, or deluded US president become subject to lethal forms of personal dissemblance and/or psychological debility?” Leaving aside the former president’s breathtaking venality as a person,there can be no credible assurances of being able to avoid another such dissembling leadership. “Individuum est ineffable,” declares the poet Goethe, “The individual cannot be grasped.”

Our worrisome national declension has certain identifiable beginnings. From 2016 to 2020, a grievously flawed American president served with inefficient and insufficient nuclear command constraints. This bold assertion is by no means mysterious or controversial. Any US presidential order to use nuclear weapons carries an inherent expectation of witting or even visceral compliance. While key figures along the operational chain of command could sometime choose to disobey such an extraordinary order, any implicit disobedience would be deemed unlawful on its face. On September 16, 2021, authoritative testimony by the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Miley, indicated just how substantially law-violating Trump’s final days had become.

Derivatively generic questions ought now also to arise: “Should any future US president ever be granted extraordinary decisional authority over uncountable lives, a nuclear war-related grant that could never have been foreseen by the Founding Fathers?” “Could such a lopsided allocation of nuclear decision authority faithfully represent what was originally intended by the American Constitution’s “separation of powers?” “Can anyone reasonably believe that such unhindered existential power could ever have been favored by the “Fathers”? “What about more general constraints of our wider global civilization?”

At a minimum, citizens and analysts can extrapolate from Articles I and II of the Constitution that the Founders displayed primary and palpable concern about expanding presidential power long before nuclear weapons. Such codified concern predates any science-based imaginations of apocalyptic possibility. Today, in order to progress prudentially and sequentially on these issues, Americans should sincerely inquire: “What next?”

A Nuclear Scholar’s Intellectual Odyssey

It’s a question long pondered by the present writer. For me, it has represented a personal but analytic question. As an academic scholar and policy-centered nuclear strategist, I have remained involved with these core security issues (Israeli and American) for over fifty years. Some highlights of this half-century involvement may help clarify relevant elements of US nuclear military policy.

On 14 March 1976, in direct response to my query concerning the United States nuclear weapons launching authority, I received a letter from General (USA/ret.) Maxwell Taylor, a former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The principal focus of this hand-written letter (attached hereto) concerned ascertainable nuclear risks of presidential irrationality. Most noteworthy, in this communication, was the straightforward warning contained in General Taylor’s closing paragraph.

Ideally, Taylor cautioned wisely, presidential irrationality – an inherently grave problem – should be dealt with during an election process and not in the bewildering throes of any ongoing decisional crisis. At that point, the general understood, that it could already be too late. Hence, he concluded: “…. the best protection (against presidential irrationality) is not to elect one…”

By extrapolation, regarding America’s ongoing presidential nuclear security problem, our most compelling and still-observable lesson is not to elect “another Trump.” We must also inquire, with a more decidedly narrow but un-deflected focus: “What are actual US governing safeguards regarding the nuclear security issue?” Always, we could be more-or-less reassured, that there are redundant structural protections built into any presidential order to use nuclear weapons. These protections ought never to be disregarded.

Nonetheless, virtually all these sensible and reinforcing safeguards stop working

“at the water’s edge.” They could become operative only at lower or sub-presidential nuclear command levels. Expressly and unambiguously, these safeguards do not apply to the American Commander-in-Chief.

So what should be done about the always prospective problem of presidential nuclear command authority?

Seemingly, there exist no permissible legal grounds to disobey a presidential order regarding the use of nuclear weapons. In principle, perhaps, certain senior individuals in the designated military chain of command could still choose to invoke authoritative “Nuremberg Obligations,” but any such last-minute invocation would almost certainly yield to more recognizable and easily manipulated considerations of U.S. domestic law.

Looking for Secure Nuclear Policy Directions

After the unprecedented Trump derangements, plausible and reasonable scenarios of nuclear war should be systematically postulated and expertly examined. For the moment, at least, if an incumbent American president operating within a chaos of his own making should issue an irrational or seemingly irrational nuclear command, the only way for the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the National Security Adviser and several possible others to obstruct this wrongful order would be “illegal” ipso facto. Under the best of circumstances, informal correctives might manage to work for a short time, but any too blithe acceptance of a “best case scenario” could hardly make realistic sense.

Such acceptance could never represent a smart or durable path to US nuclear security.

Post Covid, there are new concerns. Under the conceivably worst of possible strategic circumstances – conditions which could never simply be wished away by fiat – certain designated and authoritative decision-makers would be laid low by “biological” or disease-based adversaries. What then?

At a minimum, US strategic analysts ought to inquire promptly about more suitably predictable and promising institutional safeguards. These structural barriers could better shield Americans from a prospectively debilitated or otherwise compromised US president. “The worst,” says Friedrich Durrenmatt instructively, “does sometimes happen.”

The Swiss playwright’s assertion is unassailable.

There is more. The US is already navigating in “uncharted waters.” While President John F. Kennedy did engage in personal nuclear brinkmanship with the Soviet Union back in October 1962, he had calculated the odds of a consequent nuclear war as “between one out of three and even.” This crazily precise calculation, corroborated by JFK biographer Theodore Sorensen and by my private conversations with former JCS Chair Admiral Arleigh Burke (my lecture colleague and roommate at the Naval Academy’s Foreign Affairs Conference of 1977) suggests that President Kennedy was either (1) technically irrational in imposing his Cuban “quarantine;” or (2) wittingly acting out untested principles of “pretended irrationality.”

In markedly stark contrast to America’s barely-survived “Trump Moment,” JFK was operating with tangibly serious and intellectually capable advisors. He did not choose Adlai Stevenson to represent the United States at the United Nations because he was “glamorous” (an absurd standard of selection openly favored by former US President Donald J. Trump). Stevenson was chosen because he was intellectually gifted, educationally prepared, and diplomatically skilled.

In all likelihood, the most urgent threat of a mistaken or irrational U.S. presidential order to use nuclear weapons would flow not from any “bolt-from-the-blue” nuclear attack – whether Russian, North Korean, Chinese or American (the last scenario assuredly expressed as a permissible preemption – but from sequentially uncontrollable processes of escalation. In 1962, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev “blinked” early on in the “game,” thereby preventing any irrecoverable nuclear harm. Going forward, Americans ought never to minimize or discount potentially unstable nuclear decision-making consequences.

“Escalation Dominance” and Nuclear War

An American president should always be made to understand the grave risks of being locked into any stubborn or refractory escalatory dynamic with an adversarial country. In such cases, the only available decisional options would be a presumptively abject American capitulation or some presently unpredictable form of nuclear warfighting. Though any US president could sometimes be well advised to seek “escalation dominance” in selected crisis circumstances/negotiations, he/she would still need to avoid any catastrophic miscalculations. This overriding need would not even factor in any potentially intersecting problems of hacking intrusion, nuclear accident, or intellectual limitation/impairment.

For the immediate future, imperatives concerning miscalculation avoidance could apply most directly to various plausible one-upmanship narratives involving North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. In such narratives, much would depend upon more-or-less foreseeable “synergies” between Washington and Pyongyang and on difficult-to-control penetrations of cyber-conflict or cyber-war. Americans might sometime even have to acknowledge the bewildering interference of cyber-mercenaries, unprincipled/non-ideological third parties working only for personal or corporate compensation.

Whether Americans like it or not, and at one time or another, nuclear strategy is a challenging “game” that a US President will have to “play.” This will not be a contest for intellectual “amateurs” or for leaders lacking in requisite “will.” To best ensure that a too-easily-distracted president’s strategic moves would remain determinedly rational, thoughtful, and cumulatively cost-effective, it would first be necessary to enhance the formal decisional authority of his/her most senior military-defense subordinates.

As an indispensable and expressly welcome corollary, any such enhancement would be at the calculable expense of pertinent presidential authority.

There are salient particulars. At a minimum, the Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Advisor, and one or two others in appropriate nuclear command positions would need to prepare comprehensively and competently in advance. These figures would need to prepare to assume more broadly collaborative and secure judgments in extremis.

Responsibilities of “The People”

Such proposed widening of nuclear authority could never be “guaranteed.” In the end, following General Maxwell Taylor’s letter to me of 14 March 1976 (attached), the best protection is still “not to elect” a president who is discernibly unfit for national leadership responsibility. Beyond any reasonable doubt (an evidentiary judicial standard that also fits well in this partially extra-judicial context), we are discussing an incomparable leadership responsibility. “The safety of the people,” intoned Cicero long before the nuclear age, “is the highest law.”

There is something else. From the standpoint of correctly defining all relevant dangers, it is important to bear in mind that “irrational” does not necessarily mean “crazy” or “mad.” More specifically, prospectively fateful expressions of US presidential irrationality could take different and variously subtle forms. These forms, which could remain indecipherable or latent for a long time, would include (a) a disorderly or inconsistent value system; (b) computational errors in calculation; (c) an incapacity to communicate correctly or efficiently; (d) random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of strategic decisions; and (e) internal dissonance generated by some structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of authoritative individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as unitary national decision maker).

From the singularly critical standpoint of US nuclear weapon control issues (problematic issues likely to be worsened by any continuous American strategic postures of “First Use” and/or “Launch on Warning,”), legitimate reasons to worry about future American presidencies do not hinge on expectations of “craziness.” Rather, looking over the above list of five representative decisional traits, there is already good reason not for worry per se (which by itself could never represent a rational or purposeful US reaction), but for suitably non-partisan objectivity and more consistently calculable prudence. To be sure, it won’t be easy to make tangible progress along this front, and it won’t necessarily succeed longer-term by electing a different president. But for the United States, there are no recognizably sensible alternatives.

For the indefinite future, US national security and US survival will require the prompt and law-based restraint of any patently flawed American president. It follows further that the security benefits of such needed restraints would confer security benefits on the world as a whole. In principle, at least, the full importance of any such corollary or “spillover” benefit could prove substantial.

The United States must take heed. If Americans should ever decide to abide another blatantly law-violating and science-averse president, perhaps even a Trump-return in 2024, they could be risking nothing less than national survival. Accordingly, there can be no more urgent task than to clarify and refine America’s nuclear command authority. To fail in this indispensable task could never represent a tolerable policy outcome.

Berthold Brecht would have understood. Though many might still “laugh” at the idea of an irrational or incompetent American president in charge of US nuclear weapons, these doubters would elicit a succinct, prompt and persuasive response from the playwright. They would be instructed as follows: We “simply have not yet heard the horrible news.”

Prof. Louis Rene Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and articles dealing with war, terrorism and human rights. His latest and twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy. A previous contributor to The Algemeiner, Professor Beres’ published writings on law and strategy have appeared in Modern War Institute (West Point); BESA (Israel); JURIST; Yale Global Online; Parameters: The Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); Horasis (Switzerland); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern Diplomacy; The Atlantic; and more. Dr. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2003-2004. He was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.