Make Us Safer and Curb the Imperial Presidency: End the President’s Unchecked Power to Launch Nuclear Weapons
“National Museum of the United States Air Force Nuclear Missiles” by Kelly Michals (CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Alexandra Chandler
It is rare to find a policy that could simultaneously improve our national security, save the world from accidental annihilation, and advance the cause of democracy, all in one stroke.
This policy unicorn is an updated U.S. nuclear policy. Congress can bring the policy into the twenty-first century by removing the president’s sole control of nuclear weapons and eliminating U.S. land-based nuclear forces. Congress should remove the president’s unchecked authority to launch a nuclear first strike, transferring authority to Congress while preserving the president’s unilateral ability to retaliate against a nuclear attack.
The authority of U.S. presidents to use nuclear weapons, without any institutional check or balance, is a legacy of the national security requirements and technological shifts of the 1960 and 1970s. During the 1960s, U.S. deterrence depended upon land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) tipped with nuclear warheads and based in fixed silos.[1] The U.S. deployed these ICBMs because of their high speed in flight and their defensibility from Soviet attack [2]. However, during the 1970s, the Soviets improved their missile guidance technology, giving them the capability to destroy ICBMs in their silos before they were launched.[3] Given this vulnerability, presidents needed the authority to launch ICBMs nearly instantly—the “launch on warning” option.[4]
But the international security environment and the U.S. nuclear arsenal have changed in the past seventy years. In place of the Soviet nuclear threat and the binary deterrence calculation of the 1950s, today’s landscape encompasses potential conflicts involving an array of adversaries, resulting in far more variables and complex calculations for a U.S. president considering a nuclear strike. Meanwhile, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has grown in complexity, evolving to include not only vulnerable fixed land-based ICBMs, but also strategic bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and more novel tactical weapons. The U.S. is also subject to false alarms of attack, both resulting from human error and staged by adversaries in the cyber domain.
Yet U.S. nuclear doctrine remains stuck in a Cold War deep freeze. The absence of a U.S. no first use policy along with the continued possession of a land-based nuclear force perpetuates a decades-long incentive to “use or lose” land-based forces, not only in the event of a real crisis but also in response to false alarms.[5] Unfortunately, the growing complexity of the nuclear landscape creates a greater potential for actual crises and false alarms.
Worse still, U.S. presidents can no longer presume a baseline level of political support in their crisis decision-making. There is an increasing diversity of approaches to the use of military force both between and within political parties—and even inside administrations. In the absence of any institutional participation or check on the final presidential decision to use nuclear weapons, senior officials have improvised ad hoc checks and balances.[6] It is not surprising that the unchecked authority of the U.S. president to use nuclear weapons is an outlier among states with nuclear capabilities.[7]
Fortunately, this is a ripe moment for change. The 2021 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is underway, and bipartisan support in Congress is growing to curb the war powers of the “imperial presidency.” This is exemplified by the National Security Powers Act of 2021, consisting of war powers, arms exports, and national emergencies reform.[8]
If Congress assumes the sole power to authorize a nuclear first strike, they will ensure that such a strike can only result from political consensus. It would also create an institutional safeguard against a mentally incapacitated president launching a first strike, rather than relying upon the ad-hoc actions of senior military leaders.
Congress should also eliminate land-based nuclear forces. Given the flexible capabilities of air and sea-based nuclear weapons, land-based nuclear forces provide a minimal, even dubious, contribution to U.S. defensive and offensive military capabilities. Even proponents note that their primary value is as a “sponge” to ensure that adversaries need to fire even more nuclear weapons at the United States to avoid counterattack, thereby driving up the strategic costs of war.[9] Eliminating these weapons will improve U.S. national security by removing the perverse use-or-lose incentive. It would also save American taxpayers over $149 billion through 2046.[10]
Removing this unchecked power of the president would also aid in one of the defining struggles of our time: the contest between democracy and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism glorifies leaders who operate without constraints and use their monopoly on power to achieve their goals. This is not inconsistent with the current role of the president in U.S. nuclear policy. President Trump used his control over nuclear weapons to promote his authoritarian model of the presidency.[11] For the sake of our own democracy, we must not allow a future authoritarian president to have that power. U.S. nuclear policy must be in keeping with our aspirations to encourage the development of peaceful democracies around the world.
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, we are one hundred seconds to midnight in our struggle to avoid destruction by nuclear weapons and other disruptive technologies.[12] It is long past time to remove the president’s unilateral control over nuclear weapons, and to eliminate the dangerous land-based nuclear arsenal.
About the Author
Alexandra Chandler is a Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy, where she co-leads elections and voting rights efforts, and coordinates staff support for the National Task Force on Election Crises. She previously worked on counterproliferation issues in the Intelligence Community for 13 years, including at the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She is a proud native of New Haven.
Endnotes
1. David Wright, William D. Hartung, and Lisbeth Gronlund, “Rethinking Land-Based Nuclear Missiles,” Union of Concerned Scientists, June 2020, p. 6, https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/rethinking-land-based-nuclear-missiles.pdf
2. Ibid., 8.
3. Congressional Research Service, “Russia’s Nuclear Weapons: Doctrine, Forces, and Modernization,” September 13, 2021, p. 9. See also Donald MacKenzie, “Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance,” MIT Press, December 1990, https://books.google.com/books?id=QymEXZIWEe8C&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
4. U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance. “U.S. Nuclear Force Posture and De-Alerting,” December 14, 2015, https://2009-2017.state. gov/t/avc/rls/250644.htm
5. Daryl G. Kimball, “Nuclear False Warnings and the Risk of Catastrophe”, Arms Control Association, December 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-12/focus/nuclear-false-warnings-risk-catastrophe.
6. This high-stakes improvisation was most recently illustrated by the actions reportedly taken by General Mark Miley to preempt former President Trump’s ability to launch a nuclear attack. See Chelsey Cox, “Gen. Milley feared Trump might launch nuclear attack, made secret calls to China, new book says,” USA Today, September 14, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/14/gen-mark-milley-worried-trump-could-launch-nuclear-attack/8334915002/.
7. “Whose Finger is On the Button: Nuclear Launch Authority in the United States and Other Nations,” Union of Concerned Scientists, December 2017, https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/11/Launch-Authority.pdf.
8. U.S. Congress, Senate, National Security Powers Act of 2021, S 2391, 117th Cong., 1st sess., introduced in Senate July 20, 2021, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s2391/text.
9. This is a troubling rationale at best, especially for Americans living in the upper midwest where much of the land-based arsenal is located; Tom Collina and Akshai Vikram, “Why Are We Rebuilding the Nuclear Sponge?” The National Interest, November 6, 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-are-we-rebuilding-‘nuclear-sponge’-9437; Aaron Mehta, “Mattis Enthusiastic on ICBMs, Tepid on Nuclear Cruise Missile,” Defense One, January 12, 2017, https://www.defensenews.com/space/2017/01/12/mattis-enthusiastic-on-icbms-tepid-on-nuclear-cruise-missile/.
10. Congressional Budget Office, “Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046,” p. 41.
11. President Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldJTrump), “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” 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!,” Twitter post, January 2, 2018.
12. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Doomsday Clock: Current Time,” https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes the Doomsday Clock as “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.” The Bulletin has adjusted the time on the clock 24 times since 1947, to as far back as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 to as close as 100 seconds to midnight, the current time on the Clock.”