I've seen several articles lately about distancing the President from the National Command Authority (NCA), the rather short decision chain that authorizes nuclear war. Some writers say the President could be blocked if the circumstances justified, while others say the process allows no interference, leaving only the duty to carry out his lawful orders once valid identification is established.
In 2017 in connection with research on the history of DEFCON alerts, I had a lengthy discussion about this with Bruce Blair, who died in 2020. Bruce was a former Minuteman ICBM launch officer and later the co-founder of Global Zero. He was an authoritative, patient, super-helpful, on-the-record source for national defense correspondents. He is greatly missed.
(When I was interviewing him later about shortcuts in the nuclear enterprise pre-1973, he directed me to declassified Air Force reports that were, to say the least, disconcerting. If there's interest I'll blog on that.)
Back to the National Command Authority, NCA. Bruce was quite firm about the unforgiving process, which is built for speed in response to strategic attack, rather than reflection. He said that despite some accounts to the contrary, the Secretary of Defense plays no formal role in the NCA strike-decision-making process and, for example, could not hold things up by requesting additional identification. The SecDef would likely be part of the discussions, if available at the Pentagon's war room on short notice, but that's not the same as being in the chain of command.
Here’s how it works in the main case: assume the President is in his motorcade and sitting next to the officer with the satchel, aka Football.
The President gets a call on the satchel via the National Military Command System and is connected with an Air Force general on duty at Offutt AFB and the War Room at the Pentagon, the National Military Command Center (NMCC). The President and his civilian and military advisers quickly discuss the threat and possible responses. The President is already scanning the options in a briefing book kept inside the satchel. The President gets a challenge question and responds by reaching into his pocket for the foil-wrapped packet he carries and reading a code string from a 3x5 card. (That packet is often called the Biscuit because when sealed, it resembles a package of English cookies.)
If the President issues a nuclear strike order then the rest of the job -- the issuance of Emergency War Orders to the Navy and Air Force, retargeting, code verification, and weapons release -- proceeds without the need for further direction from the President.
What’s more, the National Military Command Center has the authority to carry out later strikes, without additional direction or authorization from the President.
But other cases of how the President and NMCC might interact in a crisis won't be so streamlined.
What if the Pentagon sees an emergency and cannot reach the President through the satchel or any other means? It will contact the VP, who has his or her own biscuit and can act as backup. But if the VP believes the President is just out of touch, he or she is likely to look for the President before acting.
What if the satchel and his military aide aren’t near to hand, due to some mishap? I believe it’s likely the President could use any phone, preferably a secure one. He would tear open the biscuit, call the NMCC and open discussions. I can guess that he’d have to answer challenges in a manner that's memorized, not written down, to block the possibility that someone else had gotten hold of the Biscuit.
What is a lawful order from the President? The Cold War plans assumed that the discussions would begin only after word from the NMCC to the President that “enemy strategic missiles are on the way from country X.” Because Cold War scenarios presumed the US would have to react in under a half hour, discussions would be short and, assuming the warning information was confirmed, no one on the line would be arguing about the lawfulness of a response.
But what if the President, rather than the NMCC, makes the first call out of the clear blue and says he wants to issue a nuclear strike order? And what if the NMCC believes the crisis identified by the President (say one in which he'd like to take out a terrorist camp in some other country) doesn't need a strike on a very short timeline and would cause heavy casualties in a noncombatant nation?
My guess is that if the President initiated the conversation rather than the Pentagon, and if the Pentagon itself had registered no imminent threat, the questions from the Pentagon to the President about lawfulness would, or should, be much more probing than if the Pentagon itself had first raised the alert. These questions might well take more than a half hour. It's not that the Pentagon is refusing a lawful order; it's trying diligently to determine if the President has lawfully justified them to issue an Emergency War Order to the nuclear forces: It would be reasonable to take time to reflect because once launched, our missiles cannot be recalled or destroyed in flight. I'm not saying this discussion would be easy or obvious: for military personnel to disobey the President, under the Code of Uniform Military Justice his command would have to be manifestly or patently illegal. if they blocked him, they'd be subject to court martial. But remember that the NMCC's commanding officers actually open the gates of nuclear hell, not the President and his satchel.
There are more subtleties in the decision process, and not all these are well publicized. One that Bruce mentioned is this: if the President were to draw up his own plan and order a land-based ICBM strike on North Korea, the military would refuse since those missiles would have to pass over Russia and China and the risk of an accidental war would be too high. The Pentagon would insist on some other delivery. This example is perhaps a small thing but indicates to me that the NMCC's role in nuclear strikes is not that of an automaton.
On balance I think the risk of an unhinged President starting a nuclear war on his own are low, assuming the NMCC is willing to think critically about whether a strike order is unlawful.
A more worrisome prospect is a nuclear detonation in the homeland from treasonous insiders in the military.
