Trump would actually have not one but several fingers on the nuclear button. One finger would be an active digit ready to point up or down for an attack to his nuclear commanders. Other fingers would shape the size and composition of U.S. nuclear forces and the strategy for their use. Additional fingers would determine nuclear actions taken in his absence or demise by presidential successors from his vice president, the Cabinet that he appoints or by generals to whom he may pre-delegate his launch authority.
As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded. Today, the nuclear deluge he could command would consist of thousands of weapons, each 10 or 20 times more deadly than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nearly 2,000 U.S. strategic nuclear weapons aimed primarily at Russia and China (at a ratio of roughly 2 to 1), with additional dozens aimed at each of several other nations—North Korea, Iran and Syria—would be at a President Trump’s disposal from his first minutes in office. The city of Moscow alone lies in the bore sights of more than 100 U.S. nuclear warheads.
There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.
If he gave the command, his executing commanders would have no legal or procedural grounds to defy it no matter how inappropriate it might seem. As long as the president can establish his or her true identity by his or her personal presence in the Pentagon’s nuclear war room or its alternates (places like Site R at Fort Richie near Camp David), or by phone or other means of communications linking him or her to these war rooms using a special identification card (colloquially known as “the biscuit” containing “the nuclear codes”) in his or her possession (or, alternatively, kept inside the “nuclear briefcase” carried by his or her military aide who shadows the president everywhere he or she works, travels and plays), a presidential nuclear decision is lawful (putting international humanitarian law aside). It must be obeyed as long as it is constitutional—i.e., the president as commander in chief believes he or she is acting to protect and defend the nation against an actual or imminent attack.
But within these broad constraints there is no wiggle room for evasion or defiance of the president’s orders. That’s true even if the national security adviser, the secretary of defense (who along with the president makes up the “national command authority”) and other top appointees and advisers disagree with the president’s decision. It does not matter whether the United States has already come under attack by nuclear or non-nuclear weapons. It does not even matter if the commander in chief simply orders the use of nuclear weapons on an ordinary day for reasons unknown to all but him or her. Under the president’s open-ended mandate to decide when the national interest is threatened, ordering up a nuclear strike is his or her prerogative, and obeying the order is incumbent upon the military servants of civilian authority.
Indeed, the military commanders have prepared for this imperative moment. At the apex of the nuclear chain of command, the operators of the arsenal have trained, exercised and managed nuclear forces to respond dutifully to orders from the president, even an order that comes out of nowhere. Everything revolves around this one individual. The president selects a war plan from a pre-prepared menu of target countries (identified earlier) and three target categories (nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, military-industrial facilities that are generally located in or near cities, and leadership redoubts ranging from the Kremlin to remote bunkers in the hinterlands).
This menu is elaborated at length in a “black book” contained in the presidential “nuclear briefcase” (often called the “nuclear football”) carried by his/her military aide. It is also reduced to a one-page cartoon-like menu for ease of comprehension and selection, an innovation of President Jimmy Carter, who found the long version too complicated to decipher within the few minutes of decision time that might be available in many circumstances.
Just prior to his inauguration, a President Trump would receive a top-secret briefing on the contents of the “black book” to be inherited upon being sworn in. On Inauguration Day, a President Trump would inherit Obama’s menu for nuclear-war plan options. This is what he would see:
On a day-to-day basis, the U.S. nuclear forces can deliver nearly 900 warheads to targets around the globe. Given a couple more days to get ready, the number of deliverable warheads would grow to nearly 2,000. In either case, these arsenals would allow for extensive strikes against opposing nuclear forces, war-supporting industries and key command posts of the opponent’s top political and military leadership.
Russia and China dominate the target list today. The following estimates the number of aim points in these and other nations, by target category:
Russia: Weapons of mass destruction (510 targets, or “aim points”), 190 leadership aim points and 250 war-supporting-industry aim points). Moscow alone would encompass 100 aim points.
China: WMD (130 aim points), 60 leadership aim points and 250 war-supporting-industry aim points).
North Korea, Iran, Syria: Each country would be covered by many dozens of warheads targeted at North Korea (50 WMD, 10 leadership and 12 war-supporting-industry aim points); Iran (40 WMD, 14 leadership and six war-supporting-industry aim points); and Syria (20 WMD, 13 leadership and 10 war-supporting-industry aim points.
The president’s basic menu of options allows for the three target categories to be struck all at once, or on the installment plan with initial strikes against WMD targets alone, followed by war-supporting industry, and then leadership targets. In addition, a number of limited options exist to deal with such contingencies as a selective strike against a rogue division of strategic missiles in Russia.
The high-level strategy underlying this specific strategic war plan has remained remarkably constant across administrations, but all presidents typically seek to put their personal stamp on it. Normally it takes a number of years for the Pentagon (with input from other agencies and ongoing guidance from the president) to produce a new “nuclear posture review” and for the president to issue new “nuclear employment guidance” based on the Pentagon’s review. Obama’s team completed his “posture review” in 2010 and his “employment guidance” in 2013.
As it turned out, Obama did not fiddle much with his predecessor’s strategy. He retained the “war-fighting” strategy involving massive strikes on mostly nuclear forces. And, despite serious misgivings, he did not uproot the long-standing U.S. policy of allowing for the first use of nuclear weapons. During his early years in office he seemed to favor a no-first-use policy, reflecting the view that the sole purpose of nuclear forces is to deter their use against us by our adversaries. The penultimate draft of his “posture review” still retained this view, but in the end one of his senior bureaucrats in his national security council talked him into preserving the first-use option. This adviser presented a scenario in which a quick U.S. nuclear strike offered the only available tool to eradicate an unfolding terrorist operation meant to spread deadly biological pathogens from a makeshift production laboratory in a remote location to cities worldwide.
Trump’s fascination with nuclear weapons appears to be nearly as strong as Obama’s. Trump emphasizes repeatedly that nukes pose the existential threat to mankind. He seems almost obsessive about this point, in contrast to his dismissive attitude toward climate change. He says his nuclear concerns stem partly from his MIT professor uncle’s tutoring on the subject, but in any case his interest is deep-seated. Trump once even expressed a wish during the Reagan years to lead the negotiations with the Soviets to reduce strategic nuclear weapons. At a reception in New York City around 1990, he ran into the U.S. START negotiator, Ambassador Richard Burt. According to Burt, Trump expressed envy of Burt’s position and proceeded to offer advice on how best to cut a “terrific” deal with the Soviets. Trump told Burt to arrive late to the next negotiating session, walk into the room where his fuming counterpart sits waiting impatiently, remain standing and looking down at him, stick his finger into his chest and say “Fuck you!”
Should we anticipate a Trump shake-up of the nuclear establishment, one that could significantly alter the likelihood of the use of such weapons? If Trump’s public pronouncements and interview comments to date are any indication, it does not seem likely. Practically all of them conform to mainstream views and indicate basic support for his predecessor’s strategy. Trump does complain that the United States gave away the store in the Iran deal, postponing the day of reckoning with a nuclear-armed Iran. But otherwise there are few if any obvious disagreements with conventional wisdom and practice.
Still, let’s measure Trump’s various statements in recent months against what he might do as president.
April 28, 2016: “I don’t want to rule out anything. I will be the last to use nuclear weapons. It’s a horror to use nuclear weapons. … I will be the last to use it, I will not be a happy trigger like some people might think. I will be the last, but I will never ever rule it out.”
That he would not categorically rule out the first use of nuclear weapons may seem controversial, but it is not. All presidents in the past have kept the nuke option on the table. So would Hillary Clinton. Like all previous presidents, he expresses a profound respect for the power of nuclear weapons, whose existence and proliferation pose the greatest threat to the world.
November 23, 2015: “I will have a military that’s so strong and powerful, and so respected, we’re not gonna have to nuke anybody.”
Like previous presidents going back to Bill Clinton, when the “revolution in military affairs” led by the advent of highly accurate and lethal non-nuclear weapons allowed the United States to reduce its reliance on the first use of nuclear weapons, Trump stresses the importance of maintaining so powerful a conventional military capability that U.S. nuclear weapons would be unneeded. Like most recent presidents, he implies that nukes lack military utility, and that non-nuclear forces alone possess real military utility.
April 6, 2016: “I would love to see a nuclear-free world. Will that happen? Chances are extremely small that will happen. So I think that’s something that in an ideal world is wonderful, but I think it’s not going to happen very easily.”
Like Obama and others, he embraces the vision of a world without nuclear weapons but finds the path forward strewn with obstacles, including Russia and Pakistan, whose security strategy relies heavily on nuclear weapons, and other nations who harbor desires for them, not to mention bad actors trying to get their hands on them, such as terrorists.
March 26, 2016: “And, would I rather have North Korea have them [nuclear weapons] with Japan sitting there having them also? You may very well be better off if that’s the case. … You have North Korea, and we are very far away and we are protecting a lot of different people, and I don’t know that we are necessarily equipped to protect them [Japan and South Korea]. Well, I think maybe it’s not so bad to have Japan — if Japan had that nuclear threat, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us.”
An apparent divergence from past policy is his willingness to withdraw America’s commitment to defend its allies with all means at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, unless those allies pony up more to defray the cost of this protection. He called NATO obsolete since the end of the Cold War, and he suggested that allies might be better off for their own protection if they build their own indigenous arsenal of nukes. These thoughts certainly run against the grain of longstanding U.S. policy, which is to keep the nuclear umbrella extended to discourage allied nations from going nuclear. At various times the United States has had to suppress incipient nuclear weapons programs in South Korea and Taiwan and reassure them of U.S. reliability in defending them. Trump’s radical position of letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle also seems clearly at odds with the entire history of U.S. nonproliferation efforts vis-à-vis allies in Asia and Europe, and if adopted would lead to a much more dangerous world.
March 26, 2016: “I think that frankly, as long as North Korea’s there, I think that Japan having a capability is something that maybe is going to happen whether we like it or not.”
April 2, 2016: “They make it sound like I want Japan to have nuclear weapons. I don’t. … Can I be honest with you? It's going to happen, anyway. … It's only a question of time. They’re [Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia] going to start having them or we have to get rid of them entirely.”
While it is true that Trump imprudently left the door ajar for Japan and/or South Korea to acquire their own nukes to ward off North Korean nuclear threats, in a way he was expressing a common expert view that the bomb is slowly but surely spreading around the world, and that proliferation may be unstoppable unless ALL nations including the nuclear-armed countries get serious about universal nuclear disarmament.
This view is that despite success in slowing the spread of the bomb, three countries joined the club during the past two decades, the jury is out on a 10th (Iran), dozens more countries have nuclear energy programs underway that pose future risks, and the double-standard of the nuclear “haves,” cigarettes dangling from their lips, lecturing the “have nots” to give up smoking is unsustainable over the long term. Trump’s main fault lay in his insouciance in imagining the bomb’s further spread to allies and foes alike. For many observers, this spread would be a nightmare. But all agree that nuclear proliferation, including allied bomb-making, is distinctly possible if the world grows ever more insecure.
So where’s the beef in the criticism of Trump’s nuclear mind-set? What’s the rational basis for fearing him fingering the nuclear button? As far as Trump’s expressed policy views are concerned, there is precious little grist for concern, let alone alarm. Something else is worrying people, and it is not hard to put your finger on it: his character and personality—his tendency to see only one image, in black or white, in a Rorschach collage, to rush to an absolute judgment on the basis of ambiguous or mixed evidence, to vilify the motives and evil-doing of foreign hands, to divide the world into winners and losers, and to castigate people with whom he disagrees, perhaps including advisers offering a different or more nuanced opinion. These are the sorts of habits of Trump’s mind and emotional reflexes that lie at the heart of fear that a President Trump would be more prone than his predecessors to angrily order up a nuclear strike.
November 23, 2015: “I would be somebody that would be amazingly calm under pressure.”
