Forty-five feet underground in a command center near Omaha, there’s an encrypted communications line that goes directly to the American president. To get to it, you need to pass through a guarded turnstile, two reinforced steel doors and a twisting hallway that leads to an ultra-secure room called The Battle Deck. It’s here, below the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, where military personnel stand by 24 hours a day awaiting a call the world hopes will never come: a direct order from their commander in chief — the president — to launch a nuclear attack.
Stratcom is the military headquarters responsible for overseeing all U.S. nuclear forces around the world.
Buried below is a military command headquarters constructed in case of a missile attack amid a national emergency.
Inside this room, Stratcom’s commander, Gen. Anthony Cotton, and his team would speak directly to the president, informing him or her about the nuclear options during a continuing crisis.
The workstations in The Battle Deck are arranged stadium-style around 15 L.E.D. screens that glow with real-time information and maps. Hanging from the ceiling, a small digital display reads: Blue Impact Timer, Red Impact Timer and Safe Escape Timer, all set to 00:00:00. If a president were to order the launch of a nuclear weapon, the timers would start ticking, alerting everyone in the room to how long they have before American weapons hit the enemy, how long before the enemy’s weapons hit us and how long before the building — and all the people in it — are destroyed by the incoming nuclear-tipped missiles.
In the United States, it’s up to one person to decide whether the world becomes engulfed in nuclear war. Only the president has the authority to launch any of the roughly 3,700 nuclear weapons in the American stockpile, an arsenal capable of destroying all human life many times over. And that authority is absolute: No other person in the U.S. government serves as a check or balance once he or she decides to go nuclear. There is no requirement to consult Congress, to run the idea by the defense secretary or to ask the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his or her opinion.
That means the American president is charged with the physical safety not only of some 334 million Americans but also of millions of people in other countries who, out of necessity, must rely upon his or her prudence and steady nerves to make a decision that could alter the course of human history.
Of course, it is Americans alone who will decide in November whom they want to endow with that power. The two front-runners — President Biden, who is 81, and former President Donald Trump, who is 77 — would be the oldest candidates in the nation’s history to appear on their parties’ tickets. Over the course of the year, they will have to confront questions from voters about their mental acuity, competence and stamina to take on another four-year term.
These are vital attributes for a commander in chief in a crisis. Yet regardless of who wins this election, or the next one, the American president’s nuclear sole authority is a product of another era and must be revisited in our new nuclear age.
No other aspect of U.S. military power is legally conducted this way. Authorizing drone strikes on terrorism suspects, for instance, requires approvals up and down the chain of command, from a commander in the field to the general overseeing the region to the defense secretary to the president. Larger operations, like a ground invasion of another country, require the president to ask Congress for a formal declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force.
Nuclear operations have a unique protocol. A nuclear attack against the United States could destroy the nation’s defenses and leadership in 30 minutes or less, giving the American president roughly 15 minutes to decide whether to launch a counterattack. The U.S. Strategic Command operates a global system to ensure that if a president orders the launch of a nuclear weapon, it will happen in minutes.
It’s an intricate procedure that involves dozens of people and perfect synchronization in a moment of inconceivable stress. Anyone in uniform who ignores a direct presidential order can be subject to court-martial for insubordination.
The E-6B Mercury is the airborne command post that links the U.S. president and U.S. military nuclear forces in the event of an enemy attack.
It’s code-named Looking Glass because it can mirror the command-and-control functions of Stratcom’s ground-based headquarters in Omaha.
The jet’s crew can contact the president, verify his or her identity and relay a nuclear attack order to bomber squadrons, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missile silos.
The idea that one human should have to make such a consequential decision in 15 minutes or less is nearly beyond comprehension. In reality, as long as nuclear weapons exist, there’s most likely no better option if the United States comes under attack. It is, however, unacceptable for an American president to have the sole authority to launch a nuclear first strike without a requirement for consultation or consensus.
Putting so much unchecked power in the hands of one person is not only risky but also deeply antithetical to how America defines itself. It also makes people deeply uneasy: Recent polling found that 61 percent of Americans are uncomfortable with the president’s sole authority. Over the years, several organizations have issued studies regarding the policy, providing recommendations on how it could be improved. Yet it survives.
One of the most surprising elements of the American president’s sole authority is how long this extraordinary power has lasted, rarely even challenged. It began in practice on August 10, 1945 — just days after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — when President Harry Truman ordered that such action could not be taken without presidential permission. In September 1948, the Truman administration issued a memo that cemented the practice. Mr. Truman’s thinking was that nuclear weapons were too important to leave in the hands of military officers, who may be overly aggressive in the field.
Mr. Truman’s successors retained it in the Cold War years when U.S. nuclear forces were on hair-trigger alert. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Washington’s biggest nightmare was a Soviet surprise attack that would obliterate U.S. fleets of bomber jets and ballistic missiles on the ground before they could be launched. The ability of a president to quickly launch a counterattack, unencumbered by the need for consultation, was considered vital to America’s survival.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said his office is currently reviewing the policy and determining whether there’s sufficient oversight. Any changes would take place either through presidential powers or with Congress. “It is a complicated — and almost theological — issue,” Mr. Sullivan said. “We’re taking a look at it, but no decisions have been made.”
Previous efforts to change the law have gone nowhere. The first serious reconsideration came in 1976, when it became public that former President Richard Nixon was often drunk and depressed during the final days of his administration. A congressional committee convened to look into revising presidential launch authority on the pre-emptive first use of nuclear weapons, but four days of hearings did not result in legislative changes. The idea wasn’t revisited again until 2017, when Mr. Trump was in the White House and threatening military action against North Korea. Democrats in the House and Senate drafted a bill that would have required the president to obtain a congressional declaration of war before launching a nuclear first strike. It never went to a vote.
Senior officials in each of those administrations later revealed that they had been so concerned about the troubled mindset of their bosses that they tried to intercede by putting themselves in the chain of command if a launch order were given. In 1969, Henry Kissinger, national security adviser for Mr. Nixon, was reported to have stood down a drunken presidential order requesting recommendations for targets to strike in North Korea after it downed a U.S. spy plane. In 2021, Mr. Trump’s Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, told the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that the military would refuse to carry out a nuclear launch order if it was against the laws of armed conflict, according to “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. But legally, neither Kissinger nor Milley was part of the nuclear-launch chain of command, and therefore it was unclear what, if anything, they would have been able to do to stop a presidential order.
American military officers can choose to disobey orders they deem to be unlawful because they fail to meet the requirements under the law of armed conflict — if, for instance, the president ordered an unprovoked attack on a foreign country.
But even top officials have publicly admitted that it’s unclear how, exactly, a refusal to execute a presidential order might work. C. Robert Kehler, a retired Air Force general who once commanded Stratcom, tried to assure Congress in 2017 that there are internal checks in place if a president orders an illegal first strike without prior deliberations and warnings. Kehler said he wouldn’t proceed if a president issued a direct order to execute such a launch. When asked what would happen next, he replied: “Well, as I say — I don’t know exactly. Fortunately, we’ve never — these are all hypothetical scenarios.”
That’s not an uncertainty the world should have to live with. Congress should immediately establish a new legal framework that restricts the president from being able to issue a nuclear launch order without the consent of another senior official unless the United States is already under attack.
The legislation should identify two other senior government leaders and require at least one of them to concur with a decision to launch before the nuclear-tipped missiles blast off. These officials should be vetted and confirmed by the Senate as a requirement for their positions in the U.S. government — for example, the secretaries of defense and state, or the four-star general officer leading the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Creating a deliberative process would help eliminate the possibility of an unhinged president recklessly instigating nuclear Armageddon, because of either madness or mishap. The policy change would also show our adversaries that the United States is lowering the risk of stumbling into a nuclear war by creating safeguards against an unfit U.S. commander in chief.
As the world staggers into another volatile nuclear age, Congress should not treat such scenarios as hypothetical. They should treat them as if all of our lives depend on them.
The president could order a partial or all-out attack drawing from the United States’ roughly 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons, many of them magnitudes more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The order is circulated to crews operating submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and bomber squadrons in the United States and under the sea.
They have less than 15 minutes before the adversary’s missiles reach the United States.
The fate of millions rests on the decision of one person.
W.J. Hennigan writes about national security issues for Opinion from Washington, D.C. He has reported from more than two dozen countries, covering war, the arms trade and the lives of U.S. service members.
An-My Lê’s 30-year body of work, which is inspired by her own experience of war and dislocation, is the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Produced by Quoctrung Bui and Jessia Ma; timeline analysis by Nuclear Threat Initiative.
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