Stop President’s Unfettered Ability To Launch Nuclear Weapons
Trump’s fear-mongering ways have always been hiding in plain sight, including his ongoing, reckless, chest pounding warnings about an imminent World War III and a nuclear conflagration, unless he is brought back to power.
The president has the singular authority to order the launch of nuclear weapons. Efforts to reign in this terrifying power have been tried over past years but have foundered after they failed to win Republican support. With his reelection possible, the moment is immediate to avoid his berserk bellicosity and worldwide destruction.
Trump is playing with the fire with his apocalyptic rhetoric and his calls to supporters to fund a “final battle” to “save our country.” If he is allowed to return to the White House, his sinister ways are likely to set us all ablaze, satisfying his Evangelical supporters who crave the end times, the rapture and the return of the messiah, in the guise of trump.
This is a man who spurred an insurrection, who has summarily fired anyone who disagreed with him, who insists that the noise from windmills cause cancer. He is not to be trusted. To avoid the perilous reality of his reelection, the law must be changed so that no president and trump in particular, will ever be able to unilaterally pull the nuclear trigger for nuclear annihilation.
The president’s authority to launch nuclear weapons is made clear in a Dec. 15, 2022, Congressional Reporting Service report, “Defense Primer: Command and Control of Nuclear Forces.”
“The President, however, does not need the concurrence of either his military advisors or the U.S. Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons. Neither the military nor Congress can overrule these orders,” the report notes.
Bruce Blair, an expert on U.S. command and control, said in the report that after receiving reports on offensive activity, analysts estimate that the President would have less than 10 minutes to absorb the information, review his options, and make his decision.
Once the order is “transmitted to the war room, they would execute it in a minute or so.” If an immediate response was selected, “the (land-based) Minuteman missiles will fire in two minutes. The submarines will fire in 15 minutes.” Blair also noted that there is no way to reverse the order.
In 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved up the prediction of its famed “Doomsday Clock” to within two and a half minutes of the end of humanity, citing climate change and nuclear proliferation as the causes. The 2016 election of trump, the bulletin said, brings the world closer to the brink than ever before. The clock is updated every January.
“Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter,” theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss and retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley wrote in a New York Times op-ed on behalf of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
On Jan. 24, 2023, the clock was set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to midnight since the symbolic clock was created in 1947. The adjustment was largely attributed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In January 2021, Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Ted W. Lieu, D-Calif., re-introduced legislation to require a Congressional declaration of war before a President could launch a nuclear first strike. The “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2021” was first introduced soon after trump was elected in 2016 but it failed to win congressional approval.
The Markey bill was proposed after the failed Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by trump supporters. Markey said in a statement that he was concerned that trump “may attempt to exert unconstitutional authority to launch the United States into an illegal war or even order the use of nuclear weapons.”
“The violent insurrection at the Capitol made President Trump’s unfitness undeniable. We cannot continue to give one person the awesome power to end life on our planet as we know it with nuclear weapons,” said Markey. “Our Constitution affords Congress, not the President, the exclusive power to declare war and that extends, clearly, to the most catastrophic type of war, nuclear war. No Commander-in-Chief should be able to act alone to start a nuclear war.”
The bill has 43 cosponsors, all Democrats.
Lieu offered three solutions to make nuclear launch approval safer. The first outlined in the bill, requires a declaration of war by Congress before any first strike is ordered. A second safeguard would be for the nation to adopt a “no-first-use” policy, which would commit the U.S. to not using nuclear weapons unless first attacked by an enemy using them. Lieu said critics have argued there may be scenarios when a first use of nuclear weapons would be necessary. But Lieu said a first strike would be unnecessary as the nation would be fully protected by current technology, including B2 bombers.
Lastly, Lieu said the U.S. and Russia could reduce their nuclear arsenals. According to the Arms Control Association, Russia has more than 6,200 nuclear warheads and the United States has more than 5,500.
“The United States and Russia could destroy the world twice,” Lieu said. “We simply don’t need these many nuclear weapons.”
Two months before the 2016 election, a group of 50 former national security officials, who had all served under Republican presidents from Richard M. Nixon to George W. Bush, warned that if elected, trump “would be the most reckless President in American history.”
The group said that trump “appears to lack basic knowledge about and belief in the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws and U.S. institutions, including religious tolerance, freedom of the press and an independent judiciary.” The officials said that trump “persistently compliments our adversaries and threatens our allies and friends. Unlike previous Presidents who had limited experience in foreign affairs, Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself. He continues to display an alarming ignorance of basic facts of contemporary international politics.”
The letter offered a scathing opinion of trump’s inability “to take advice, discipline himself, control his emotions and reflect before acting. He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood.”
The letter goes on to say that trump does not encourage conflicting views, lacks self-control and acts impetuously.
“He cannot tolerate personal criticism. He has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behavior. All of these are dangerous qualities in an individual who aspires to be President and Commander-in-Chief, with command of the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” the letter warned.
Jordan Gans-Morse, political science professor at Northwestern University, said in March 2022 that nuclear missile protocol had to be changed in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s move to put his nuclear deterrent forces on alert.
“The office of the presidency, with its all but unlimited authority over the decision to employ nuclear weapons, needs to be Trump-proofed well before the 2024 presidential elections,” Gans-Morse wrote. “It is hard to imagine a situation that drives home the risks that Donald Trump as commander in chief posed to national and global security as clearly as Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”
Gans-Morse said he was most concerned with trump’s “reckless temperament and fundamental misunderstanding of strategic nuclear diplomacy that would truly endanger the civilized world should the U.S. ever find itself on the brink of a nuclear confrontation with Trump at the helm.”
Gans-Morse said that other than legislation to preserve electoral integrity, “no other policy question deserves urgent attention more than the creation of a safety mechanism to safeguard against an itchy presidential nuclear trigger finger. This would be true regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.”
Gans-Morse is an associate professor of political science and the faculty director of the Russian, Eurasian and East European studies program at Northwestern University. He is the author of the book “Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and Demand for Law” and was a 2016–17 Fulbright scholar in Ukraine.
Trump’s instability has always been in full view, for all to see.
Less than a year into trump’s presidency, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials were so distraught about rising tensions with North Korea that they held multiple meetings to prepare for a nuclear attack on American soil, according to a book by Miles Taylor, who was a top official in the department at the time.
In an excerpt of the book “Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump,” Taylor describes concerns in the trump administration in 2017 after North Korean missile tests , including one while then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump responded to the missile tests with increasingly bellicose rhetoric.
In a September 2017 speech to the United Nations, Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, dubbing North Korean President Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man.” Earlier, in January, trump discussed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and suggested he could blame a U.S. strike against the communist regime of another country. The comments are in a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, who reported on the reactions by then-White House chief of staff John Kelly.
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,’” Trump tweeted in January 2018. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Kim said in June 2020 that nuclear war was “the only option left” after negotiations between the U.S. and Pyongyang collapsed. Trump has spoken of his positive relationship with Kim during his 2024 campaign, describing the rapport as a “very good thing” and saying Kim and other world leaders “respected me.”
“In the national security world, anything having to do with nuclear weapons is handled with extreme sensitivity — well planned, carefully scripted — yet we didn’t know what trump might say at any given moment,” wrote Taylor, who was intelligence and counter-threats counselor to the secretary of homeland security at the time. “One day, he threatened North Korea ‘with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.’ He almost seemed to welcome a nuclear conflict, which terrified us.”
Taylor wrote that then-Defense Secretary James Mattis alerted him “to prepare like we’re going to war.”
On Nov. 28, 2017, North Korea tested a missile that could have reached the continental United States. Taylor wrote that then-acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke spoke with trump but that he wanted to talk about DHS’s upcoming decision on whether to extend temporary legal protections for Hondurans who came to the United States.
“Although a nuclear-capable missile had just ripped through the skies, the president’s mind was on the border,” Taylor’s wrote. “He wanted DHS to ‘deport them all,’”
Taylor said in an interview that it was “the first time to my knowledge that DHS thought there was the possibility, however remote, of Trump actually starting a war and us having to prepare for the nuclear fallout in the homeland.”
In another book, “Peril,” authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa report that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took steps to prevent then-President trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency.
According to the book, in the days before the 2020 election, Milley also acted to prevent a potential conflict with China. The book said Milley received intelligence that Chinese officials believed the U.S. was getting ready to attack them. To defuse tensions, Milley called the head of China’s military, Gen. Li Zuocheng, and told him the “American government is stable” and “we are not going to attack.”
Trump has frequently blamed the world’s problems on President Joe Biden’s foreign policies, contending that Biden had “driven Russia right into the arms of China” and that Biden officials “act tough when they should act nice, they act nice when they should act tough. Honestly, they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. We’re going to end up in a world war over this stuff.”
Trump has been cavalier in his comments about nuclear war. This past Wednesday, trump told a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, that he is the only presidential candidate who can prevent World War III, while claiming we are “very close” to it breaking out and causing “obliteration of the planet.”
Trump has claimed that if he had been president at the time, that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine and that trump would quickly end the war.
“Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” trump said. “It will take 24 hours, if it’s not done before then.”
The former president said the world is “in more danger than it’s ever been because of the power of weaponry, and I will be the only one — I can say this with great surety — I will prevent World War III,” Trump said in Iowa.
“We’re very close. I don’t know if you feel it, but we’re very close to World War III when you see these discussions taking place. And this wouldn’t be a war like with armies, tanks running back and forth shooting at each other — World War I, World War II — this would be obliteration. This would be the worst thing that’s ever been,” he said.
Trump made similar remarks during a rally in Iowa in October, soon after the Palestinian military group Hamas attacked Israel.
“We are closer to World War III than we’ve ever been,” Trump said in Cedar Rapids on October 7. “And I’m the only one that will prevent World War III.”
In February, trump posted ominous warnings on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“This is the most dangerous time in the history of our Country,” trump wrote. “World War III is looming, like never before, in the very dark and murky background. ‘Leadership’ is solely responsible for this unprecedented danger to the USA, and likewise, the World. HOPELESS JOE BIDEN IS LEADING US INTO OBLIVION!!!”
The post was quickly liked nearly 15,000 ties and shared by around 5,000 accounts.
Last month, trump hoped to prey on fears of Latinos when he said in an interview on the Spanish language, Univision network, that Mexico could be at risk of nuclear destruction in a potential World War III. He described Biden as “a man that doesn’t even know what a nuclear weapon is as our chief negotiator. And it’s a very scary thing. You could end up in World War III, and World War III happens, probably Mexico will no longer be around, because the power of nuclear weapons are so big.”
Trump said in an interview on Fox on Monday, Sept 25, that if he was presently president, he’d threaten Putin with nuclear war.
“I listened to him constantly using the N-word, that’s the N-word, and he’s constantly using it: the nuclear word,” trump said regarding prior conversations with the Russian leader. “We say, ’Oh, he’s a nuclear power.’ But we’re a greater nuclear power. We have the greatest submarines in the world, the most powerful machines ever built…. You should say, ‘Look, if you mention that word one more time, we’re going to send them over and we’ll be coasting back and forth, up and down your coast. You can’t let this tragedy continue. You can’t let these, these thousands of people die.”
In January, trump warned of World War III and said that if he is reelected, he would “build a state of the art next generation missile defense shield, just as Israel is now protected by the Iron Dome.” He did not explain the details in building a mammoth shield.
Last January, a new book reported that in 2017, trump discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and suggested he could blame a U.S. strike against the communist regime on another country. The book, by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, reports on the reactions by then-White House chief of staff John Kelly.
Eight days after Kelly arrived at the White House as chief of staff, trump warned that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” When Trump delivered his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2017, he threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” if Kim, whom he referred to as “Rocket Man,” continued his military threats.
Later that month, Trump continued to goad North Korea through his tweets. But Kelly was more concerned about what Trump was saying privately, Schmidt reports.
“What scared Kelly even more than the tweets was the fact that behind closed doors in the Oval Office, Trump continued to talk as if he wanted to go to war. He cavalierly discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, saying that if he took such an action, the administration could blame someone else for it to absolve itself of responsibility,” according to the new section of the book.