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[MUSIC PLAYING] I’m Bill Hennigan. I’m a national security writer for Times Opinion section. And I am the lead writer in our new nuclear series, At the Brink. In the United States, it is up to one person whether or not the country goes to nuclear war. Should any one person have that much power? I recently went to US Strategic Command, which is near Omaha, Nebraska. And it’s there where the US military oversees all nuclear forces across the world as well as nuclear weapons here in the United States.
- bill hennigan
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So, really, what I’m here for is twofold, to understand how the command works — particularly if there was an order to launch a nuclear strike.
The US Strategic Command is a sprawling base. And it’s highly guarded, of course. I was able to talk to military officials in one of the conference rooms upstairs. Of course, it’s a difficult subject to talk about because so much of it is secret.
- bill hennigan
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If there were to be a presidential order to launch, what would that process look like?
- speaker
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I can talk at the broadest level that there are people that have to be connected to each other and those people make decisions. And we roll out on that decision.
There’s just a lot that they won’t get into.
- speaker
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It gets into the classified setting — It’s very difficult to talk about that.
Afterward, they took me down to something they call the battle deck. So, the battle deck is 45 feet below the headquarters building. In order to get there, you take an elevator and then you walk to what’s essentially a security checkpoint. There are armed guards. And once you gain access, you have to walk through the turnstile.
And there’s a vault-like door like you see in the movies with banks. And you walk through that. And then you walk through a labyrinth of hallways. And they took me to the battle deck itself.
So when you walk in the room, it looks like a theater. The workstations are arranged stadium style and a semi-circle around the 15 LED screens that glow with real-time information and maps. There are three timers hanging from the ceiling. If a president were to order the launch of a nuclear weapon, the timers would start ticking —
[TICKING]
— alerting everyone in the room how long they have, how long before our 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 incoming nuclear-tipped missiles.
In the event that an adversary does try to attack the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, the flight time is about 30 minutes. And a president has about 15 minutes to decide whether or not to launch a nuclear strike.
We have a nuclear monarchy here only the president can make the decision on whether or not to use nuclear weapons or not. And that is unlike any other aspect of the military. The sole authority that we have started with the dawn of the atomic age.
- archived recording
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The natural power of the universe is harnessed in the new atomic bomb. Its tremendous —
When President Harry Truman decided to use nuclear weapons in World War II on Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki —
- harry truman
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A short time ago, an American aeroplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
— the power stayed with the president at that time. The thinking was that you don’t want to delegate authority down to lower-level military officers to decide whether or not the world goes to nuclear war. So the decision stayed with the president. And throughout the Cold War, it made sense as well because it was done for expediency. You wanted to be able to respond quickly if an adversary attacked you.
And so rather than having this wringing of hands deliberations, the president could decide immediately whether or not to launch that attack.
For all practical purposes, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to introduce more people to that decision-making process. I mean, anybody with a spouse can say, it takes more than 15 minutes to decide what you want to eat for dinner at night. However, when it comes to first use, launching the first strike, it’s unacceptable that one person has that much power to decide whether or not to use the weapons.
There is a long history of this being debated in Congress. In the ‘70s, after President Richard Nixon left office, it became known that he was often drunk during the end of his presidency. And during the Trump presidency, again, this was a concern about whether or not Trump could launch a nuclear strike without any deliberations.
Recently, I asked the president’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan about this. And he said that this was a topic under review, that they’re interested in adding a layer of oversight to the presidential power. But as he told me, it’s very complex. And there’s not an easy fix, at least not one that they see at the moment.
We’ve had, for the last 25 years or so, a period of relative peace when it comes to nuclear issues. But as we’ve seen in Ukraine and in the Korean Peninsula, where Kim Jong Un is regularly testing missiles and making these threats towards the South Koreans and as well as American forces in the region, we’re in a new age when it comes to nuclear weapons. American voters are going to have to decide between two of the oldest candidates that ever ran for the US presidency. And they’ll have to determine which of those has the mental competency and stamina and health to be invested with that power. Regardless of who wins this election, I think that the US sole decision-making authority when it comes to nuclear weapons is out-of-date. It is way too much power for one person to have to decide whether or not the world as we know it will exist.
