The President’s Power To Launch Nuclear Weapons Highlights A Troubling Paradox In U.S. Strategy

Once U.S. nuclear missiles are launched, they can’t be recalled.

Wikipedia

The U.S. government is engaged in a comprehensive modernization of its nuclear arsenal that will replace all three types of weapon systems comprising the strategic deterrent and upgrade the command network that controls them.

The nuclear command, control and communications system, often referred to simply as NC3 in military circles, is the least visible part of the strategic posture, but also the most complex. It consists of over 200 separate programs, some of which also provide command of non-nuclear forces.

Command and control of the nuclear force is vital to the deterrence of war. As Bruce Blair, a seminal thinker on the subject, observed in a 1985 book, “If command and control fail, nothing else matters.”

A single warhead of the kind commonly found in the Russian strategic arsenal can devastate 36 square miles of an urban area such as New York, and the Russians have at least 1,550 such warheads capable of reaching targets in the U.S.

China, after many years of restraint, is now expanding its own strategic arsenal.

The U.S. government long ago abandoned efforts to blunt a major nuclear attack against its homeland. The destructive power of the Russian and Chinese arsenals seemed too fearsome to counter, and leaders worried that trying to do so would provoke an arms race.

So, U.S. survival depends instead on the threat of retaliation. The fundamental precept of deterrence strategy is that an aggressor will not attack if it knows it will suffer intolerable damage in response. That’s the phrase planners often use—”intolerable damage.”

But it isn’t enough to possess weapons capable of visiting such destruction on an adversary. There needs to be an NC3 system that can detect attacks quickly, determine their source, and deliver a nuclear response proportional to the provocation.

Speed and proportionality are critical for the threat of retaliation to be credible. If the U.S. fails to react quickly, much of its arsenal might be destroyed on the ground. If it fails to respond in a measured way, it could cause a limited attack to escalate to all-out war.

The overarching goal of U.S. nuclear strategy is to prevent nuclear war from occurring by depriving enemies of any rational reason for beginning one. The nuclear force must be able to survive and operate even in the midst of cataclysmic conflict.

At the same time, adversaries and allies must be sure that there is no chance of what Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley in a 2021 memo described as “an illegal, unauthorized or accidental launch.”

Thus, the nation’s nuclear posture must be super stable, and yet able to respond deliberately and decisively in a surprise attack.

This has led to an underlying paradox in that posture as planners struggle to reconcile the need for control of weapons with the need to act fast in an emergency.

The paradox is that although the NC3 system provides checks on the authority to use weapons at every level below the president, the president himself (or herself) has sole authority to order the launch of nuclear weapons. There are no limits on that authority, no official with the power to countermand a launch order from the chief executive.

Conversely, if the president elects not to launch weapons, even in an extreme crisis, no official has the power to compel him. The president’s control of the nuclear arsenal is absolute, at least until his demise in said crisis is confirmed.

Demise in such a scenario would be highly likely. The only plausible circumstances in which a rational adversary would launch a nuclear attack is the belief that it can degrade U.S. retaliatory forces in a surprise attack.

The adversary would probably begin by destroying the nation’s capital in what is sometimes called a decapitating attack on the government, and then quickly shift to targeting U.S. nuclear forces before the chain of command can regroup.

U.S. Strategic Command trains continuously to preclude such an attack from succeeding, but there’s no way of knowing how a nuclear adversary might act in a crisis, or how they might assess their options.

If, for example, Russia launched its initial attack on the nation’s capital from submarines hidden west of Bermuda—a favored operating area—President Biden might have less than ten minutes to respond.

During that time, he would need to confirm warnings of an attack, assess the scope of the attack, confer with available experts, select appropriate launch options, and convey his decision to U.S. nuclear forces.

That’s a lot to do in ten minutes, even with the president’s nuclear communications equipment nearby (as it always is), including a compendium of retaliatory options and authentication codes to prove launch orders are valid.

Hence the paradox. In a command and control system where tens of billions of dollars have been spent to assure affirmative control of weapons of mass destruction, at the very apex of the system the ultimate decider has no constraints on his or her authority to launch.

This unfettered power exists even in the absence of any apparent emergency. If President Biden directed a nuclear launch today, the only way that could be stopped would be for subordinates to violate their oaths to follow orders. Even if the president appeared to be suffering from diminished cognitive capacity, or an emotional breakdown.

For all the effort the military has made to refine its nuclear command and control system, no one seems to have devised a suitable alternative to the president’s unilateral launch authority. As Bruce Blair put it in a 2016 Politico article, fears of existential conflict have made the presidency “something akin to a nuclear monarchy.”

Does the president’s power make deterrence more credible? In some circumstances it probably does. In other circumstances, it might make nuclear conflict more likely—for example, if the attacker thinks the president will be too disoriented to respond quickly, or is threatening to launch in the absence of a real provocation.