Bruce G. Blair is a nuclear security expert and a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton and the co-founder of Global Zero.



Donald Trump, December 15, 2015: “The biggest problem we have is nuclear—nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That's in my opinion that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

Hillary Clinton, June 2, 2016: “This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes. It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.”


To a degree we haven’t seen, perhaps, since the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, the question of Donald Trump’s temperament and judgment on matters of war and peace is stirring attention—and trepidation, particularly when the subject of nuclear weapons comes up. Some people believe that Trump himself is the maniac, the madman with nukes that appears in Trump’s own worst nightmare. And it’s not just Trump’s general-election opponent, Hillary Clinton, who’s hinting at this; his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual." Others would side with Trump’s view that the weapons themselves—which pack a destructive force amounting to “Hiroshima times a thousand,” as he put it—are the evil. But these points are not mutually exclusive.

What would it mean to have Trump’s fingers on the nuclear button? We don't really know, but we do know this: In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. You might imagine this awesome executive power would be hamstrung with checks and balances, but by law, custom and congressional deference there may be no responsibility where the president has more absolute control. There is no advice and consent by the Senate. There is no second-guessing by the Supreme Court. Even ordering the use of torture—which Trump infamously once said he would do, insisting the military “won’t refuse. They’re not gonna refuse me”—imposes more legal constraints on a president than ordering a nuclear attack.

If he were president, Donald Trump—who likes to say he doesn't spend a lot of time conferring with others ("My primary consultant is myself," he declared in March)—would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.

The “nuclear button” is a metaphor for a complex apparatus that has the president’s brain at its apex. The image of a commander in chief simply pressing a button captures none of the machinery, people and procedures designed to inform the president and translate his or her decisions into coherent action. Although it remains shrouded in secrecy, we actually know a great deal about it, beginning with the president’s first task of opening the “nuclear suitcase” in an emergency to review his nuclear attack options. If we shine our light at the tactical and timing considerations of how a first- or second-strike attack would unfold, and at the inner workings of the nuclear decision process from the standpoint of the White House, we gain a much better idea of a presidential candidate’s fitness for this responsibility. And here it is essential to consider a candidate’s temperament and character—especially in situations of extreme stress. Decisiveness is important, but so is prudence.

Let us say the president is awakened in the middle of the night (the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call) by his or her top nuclear adviser and told of an incoming nuclear strike. Since the flight time of missiles fired from launch stations in Russia or China to the White House is 30 minutes, and 12 minutes or less for missiles fired from submarines lurking in the Western Atlantic Ocean (Russian subs historically favor a patrol area to the west of Bermuda), the steadiness and brainpower of the commander in chief in such circumstances are serious questions indeed. The voting public must ask whether a given candidate would remain calm—or panic, become discombobulated and driven to order an immediate nuclear response on the basis of false information.

This call has never happened, but if it ever does, the situation would be as stressful and dangerous as things ever get inside the Oval Office. The closest we came to such a call occurred in 1979, when the consoles at our early warning hub in Colorado lit up with indications of a large-scale Soviet missile attack. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, received back-to-back calls in the middle of the night informing him of the imminent nuclear destruction of the United States. The second call reported an all-out attack. Brzezinski was seconds away from waking Carter to pass on the dreadful news and convince him of the need to order retaliation without delay (within a six-minute deadline). Brzezinski was sure the end was near.

Just before he picked up the phone to call Carter, Brzezinski received a third call, this time canceling the alarm. It was a mistake caused by human and technical error. A training tape simulating an all-out Soviet attack had inadvertently slipped into the actual real-time attack early warning network. The impending nuclear holocaust was a mirage that confused the duty crew. (They were fired for taking eight minutes instead of the required three minutes to declare their degree of confidence that an attack against North America was underway.)

How would a President Trump behave under such duress, informed of the attack and the imminent destruction of the nation’s capital and himself? He would have only a few minutes to consider the reliability of the attack report and decide whether and how to retaliate. If the attack is real, and he hesitates, a president will likely be killed and the chain of command decapitated, perhaps permanently. During the short countdown to impact, he also will be advised by the head of the Strategic Command in Omaha (or the officer on duty that night if the four-star head of Strategic Command cannot get onto the conference call on time) that the incoming attack will destroy the bulk of the U.S. land-based strategic missile force unless the president makes a timely decision ordering their egress from their underground silos before incoming warheads arrive. Furthermore, he will hear that the loss of this land-based force will mean that the goals of the U.S. war plan will not be realizable. (These goals require the ability to destroy the vast bulk of the Russia target base consisting of just under 1,000 aim points and of the China target base of just under 500 aim points.)

Yet if the president yields to this pressure and orders immediate retaliation, then he risks launching on false warning.

Voters should want to consider whether Trump or any other candidate possesses the steely nerves and competence to deliberate intelligently and calmly at the moment of truth. How does the candidate process ambiguity? Does he or she interpret ambiguous or contradictory data in black-and-white terms or in ways that reinforce his or her bias? Does the candidate rush to conclusions? Does he or she appear to place too much stock and faith in the performance of technical systems, such as the sensor systems in early warning networks, and underestimate the fallibility of people and machines?

It is of course not unreasonable to believe that the nuclear responsibilities of any president are above the pay grade of every living human being—that no one is really up to the task. The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons.

And yet until that far-off day we expect our president at least not to act rashly under pressure, and to ensure with near-absolute certainty that the United States never launches a nuclear strike on the basis of spurious indications of an incoming attack. It is possibly asking too much, however, because even the most level-headed commander in chief simply cannot process all that he or she needs to absorb under the short deadlines imposed by warheads flying inbound at the speed of 4 miles per second. The risks of mistaken launch based on false warning, human error in control systems, and panic in the face of imminent death are very real and probably inherent in the hair-trigger nuclear postures of the United States and Russia.

Most presidents during the Cold War lived in dread of this moment knowing all too well the attendant risks. Ronald Reagan expressed incredulity that he would be allowed only six minutes to decide whether to trigger Armageddon based on blips on a radar screen. There is no guarantee that the next president will exercise due caution when the balloon appears to have gone up.

Although no president during the atomic age appears to have ever lost his grip on reality to such an extent that an insane nuclear act might have resulted, top advisers to President Richard Nixon tried to constrain his launch authority during the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced his resignation. His secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, quietly instructed the Pentagon war room to double check with him if Nixon contacted it to order up a nuclear strike. Nixon’s mental stability, and his heavy drinking, caused concern within his inner circle that he might behave erratically out of despair and depression. Alcoholism in a future nuclear monarch is of course quite beyond the pale.

Trump’s teetotaling lays that concern to rest, but his quick temper, defensiveness bordering on paranoia and disdain for anyone who criticizes him do not inspire deep confidence in his prudence. Can we trust a President Trump to remain grounded and sensible under extraordinary pressure in a crisis that appears to be crossing the nuclear Rubicon?

Yet a harried decision to launch on warning in the belief that the United States is under nuclear attack is not even the most plausible scenario a President Trump might face today. That is more likely to be a crisis that escalates by design or inadvertence to the nuclear brink and then spins out of control. To be sure, the U.S. and Russian launch on warning postures have certainly put them at the mercy of false alarms. (Russia adopted the practice during the Cold War and maintains it today despite having a decrepit early warning network that has shortened President Vladimir Putin’s decision time to two to four minutes.) Computer glitches and human error have generated serious false alarms in the past, and every day events happen that trigger the sensors and require a closer look—peaceful space launches (satellites and astronauts), missile test launches, conventional combat missile launches, fighter jets taking off on after-burners, and even wildfires. But close calls have been fairly rare—about three serious false alarms in the United States and three in the Soviet Union/Russia that could have led to a very bad call by their leaders have occurred.

By comparison, there have been dozens of intense confrontations between the nuclear adversaries in the past, almost all of which tested the mettle, composure and restraint of their leaders. The next president will become embroiled in ongoing low-boil nuclear standoffs with Russia, China and North Korea that could morph quickly into a full-blown nuclear crisis. In such situations, actions thought to be defensive and reassuring to allies are often viewed as offensive by the opponent, whose reaction starts another cycle of action-reaction.

The United States and Russia today are entwining themselves in this trap over Ukraine, U.S. missile defenses in Europe and other disputes. Military buildups with nuclear dimensions are underway, and nuclear threats have been made explicitly by Russian officials including Putin and implicitly by each side’s nuclear force operations—for instance, flying strategic bombers close to each side’s territory. Both Putin and President Barack Obama are reminding each other, to a degree we haven’t seen since the Cold War, that they have nuclear buttons at hand.

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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.

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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.”

Let us play out what happens on Inauguration Day. The “nuclear briefcase” would change hands, and a President Trump would be given his special identification card with “the nuclear codes” used to “authenticate” before conveying his nuclear commands. (Presidents Carter and Clinton both lost their cards on two occasions.) If the balloon goes up someday, Trump, assisted by his military aide, would consult the card to find a short reply code (such as “Delta Zulu”) that matches the challenge code (such as “Echo Bravo”) issued by the leader of the Pentagon’s war room (a colonel or brigadier general). This brief exchange would establish Trump’s identity and confer all rights as commander in chief to order the military to carry out his nuclear wishes, possibly including launching an all-out nuclear attack on country X, Y or Z. After authenticating, his menu selection from the war plan in the “black book” is all that is needed to trigger a U.S. strategic nuclear assault. If he does not like the menu, he can request a special dish, but that would delay things by hours or days.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that any president provoked by real or perceived threats can give the command to launch a nuclear attack at a moment of his or her choosing simply by ordering it up. The Pentagon war room would immediately translate the president’s selection from the menu into an “emergency action message.” Within about one minute, the duty team in the war room would format a message that would unleash the forces assigned to the president’s selection. The message would also contain the all-important launch authorization codes known as sealed-authentication codes (SAS codes) prepared by hand at the National Security Agency and distributed throughout the military nuclear chain of command.

This message ordering the partial or all-out employment of nuclear forces would be rapidly encrypted and transmitted, using landline, radio and satellite communications, to all subordinate nuclear commanders down to the level of individual firing crews in underground launch facilities, inside submarines and onboard bomber aircraft.

Once released into the electromagnetic ether, the attack unfolds irrevocably on fast forward. Within a couple of minutes after the initial worldwide transmission of an execution message, hundreds of missiles carrying hundreds of warheads could be hurling around the planet, impervious to any attempt to recall them. Launch-order tweet in hand, the Minuteman land-based rocket crews need only seconds to compare the SAS codes in the launch order with the plastic-envelope SAS codes in their safe; if the codes match, they will assume the order came from the president although only the military chain of command possesses these codes. Within a minute, they complete the launch procedures: With a few strokes on a keyboard, they target their missiles according to the designated war plan and unlock the missiles using the codes in the launch order. Then, in unison at the designated time—the “execution reference time” GMT given in the tweet, they turn the launch keys. With that turning of keys by them and simultaneously by another crew in their squadron, up to 450 silo-based boosters would immediately ignite and propel their rockets out of their silos on their way to the other side of the planet.

Simultaneously, a submarine crew on launch patrol would go through its short-order drill of positioning the boat at the firing depth (about 150 feet) and simultaneously prepping their missiles for firing. They open a safe, verify the SAS codes, unlock an inner special safe using a code from the launch order to retrieve the captain’s essential fire-control key, spin up the gyroscopes on their 24 missiles onboard to aim them at their designated targets, and pull the firing trigger releasing the missiles in pairs.

Altogether only 15 minutes would elapse before 850 land- and sea-based missile warheads would take flight. There would be no stopping, no recall, no turning back the salvo. In all likelihood, a return volley of Russian missiles would be triggered. The scale of the ensuing disaster defies comprehension. In a large-scale nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of lives would be extinguished in a few agonizing hours. A global humanitarian catastrophe would ensue to seal the fate of civilization itself.

How could this all start? The nuclear scenario invoked most often during presidential electoral politics is not characterized by reckless behavior by a commander in chief under normal circumstances, but rather by loss of composure under stress, particularly when told the nation is under nuclear attack.

Another question is: Would the next president exercise independent judgment in a crisis, or would he or she get swept into the whirlpool of groupthink? A future president, like the present one, will be immersed in a complex web of nuclear operators who live and die by checklists. There is little choice but to follow checklists given the tremendous temporal and emotional pressures weighing on them. The deadlines are tight for everyone involved in nuclear operations. The duty crew inside the early warning hub in Colorado processes attack indications sent from infrared satellites that can detect the hot plumes of missiles during their fiery boost phase of flight (first several minutes) and from ground-based radars that detect the metallic body of missiles and warheads in flight throughout their trajectory from launch to impact.

This crew is expected to assess whether North America is under nuclear attack within three minutes of receiving the initial sensor input, and to promptly report their preliminary assessment up the chain of command in order to start the clock on a presidential response. The president and his or her top nuclear advisers then convene an emergency telecommunications conference to receive a briefing about the size and character of an incoming raid and the time to impact, and a briefing from the Strategic Command about the president’s response options (war plan menu) and their consequences. The press of circumstances if submarine warheads are en route may force the latter briefing to be shortened to as little as 30 seconds. Then the president has just a few minutes to decide and convey his decision to the military war rooms.

This process leaves precious little latitude for rational deliberation on the response that best serves the national security interest of the nation. Instead, the process at all levels is reduced to an enacting of a pre-prepared script. A president would have to muster enormous will and confidence to step out of his or her prescribed role and really take command of the situation, exercise independent judgment and brake a runaway train. Who in the world could be so presidential in such circumstances? Obama? Clinton? Trump? In reality, only an exceptional person would pass this test.

A similar extension of a president’s nuclear finger can take the form of presidential orders pre-delegating his or her launch authority to senior military officers to handle contingencies in which Washington disappears under a mushroom cloud. Every president from Dwight Eisenhower through Reagan did so (John F. Kennedy fudged it slightly), typically to a raft of military commanders known as “nuclear CINCs [commanders in chief]”—that is, four-star generals and their own successors (down to the two-star level) whose portfolio included nuclear operations. At any time as many as eight or more such “nuclear CINCs” possessed pre-delegated authority.

Many years ago, I was a freshly minted second lieutenant, the lowest-ranking officer on the base, at Strategic Air Command Headquarters near Omaha, working for a colonel who later rose to the lofty position of SAC’s second-in-command during the Reagan administration. After he retired, we talked at length about the pre-delegated launch authority granted to him by Reagan. It was virtually carte blanche authority to choose from the menu of strike options and order its immediate implementation in the event of a communications outage that prevented direction from the president or his lawful successors. In all likelihood, the presidential successors would be incommunicado, and after a quick roto-dial failed to turn any up, the pre-delegated generals would have taken charge. Several autonomous nuclear CINCs, themselves cut off from each other, would be directing the nuclear forces under their command while attempting to transmit the “go-code” to the forces in the other commands. It was a messy arrangement that may well have interfered with the reconstitution of the presidential line of succession.

After the end of the Cold War, President Clinton and his Defense secretary, William Perry, rolled back the earlier arrangements for pre-delegating authority to generals. Might a President Trump resurrect the practice? As the nuclear monarch, it would be his prerogative, but in fact a rationale exists for doing so. With the whiff of Cold War confrontation back in the air as Russia and NATO square off over the Baltic and the Black Sea and ramp up their global nuclear operations as well as their investment in new nuclear weapons systems, the security environment has deteriorated to the point of needing to strengthen the resilience of the nuclear command, control and communications and early warning network. Decades of neglect of this network coupled with a rollback of pre-delegated authority increased its vulnerability to a decapitation strike by a combination of kinetic and cybernetic assaults. If command and control fails, nothing else matters.

To whom might Trump pre-delegate his launch authority to shore up the credibility of strategic deterrence and continuity of government, and what terms would he specify? Who would Trump appoint to the top positions in the Pentagon, at Strategic Command and at other U.S. combatant commands with nuclear responsibilities around the world? Once again, Trump’s nuclear tentacles could reach deeply into the world of nuclear operations. His own finger might be severed by a decapitation strike, but his hand-picked generals and advisers who survive him could ensure that the Trump "dead hand" kept a ghostly finger on the nuclear button.

One can only speculate on Trump’s leadership if events conspire to embroil his presidency in a full-blown confrontation with a nuclear armed opponent. Although he has expressed very strong reservations about using U.S. nuclear weapons to settle any dispute, his views on crisis diplomacy, the military utility of nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy and many other subjects that bear on the question at hand—such as his likely picks for senior security positions in his administration—are unformed. It is well nigh impossible to assess his aptitude for crisis problem solving.

We do know a couple of positive things that may inspire some confidence. He does not drink, and he possesses unusual stamina. Inebriation, fatigue and exhaustion cause blunders and militate against the smart resolution of crises. And at least one of his senior policy advisers is an uncommonly knowledgeable and level-headed Air Force veteran of 25 years, Sam Clovis, a former fighter pilot whose main job was to deliver nuclear bombs to targets in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This adviser understands that nuclear weapons have little or no military utility in today’s security environment and that their political utility in a confrontation with a leader like Putin is scarcely any greater. Whether Trump surrounds himself with sensible advisers like Clovis, and listens to them, would have huge consequences for dampening escalation and avoiding nuclear conflict. So far, most respected Republican advisers have boycotted the Trump campaign.

April 27, 2016: “To me, always the No. 1 security threat to the United States is nuclear… and we have to be unbelievably careful.”

Trump gets this one right, in spades. It is one thing to stand tall, talk tough and press for advantage in hardball negotiations. It is another to stoke embers with excessive bluster and overreaction in nuclear war preparations. To keep a lid on nuclear brinksmanship during a crisis, Trump would have to keep open lines of communications, listen closely to the other side’s positions and demands, clarify and enforce one’s own red lines, negotiate in good faith, keep promises, contain emotions, refrain from insults, and not lie. It means understanding that overplaying one’s hand and provoking rapid escalation could end in disaster. It means knowing the adversary, its capabilities and limitations, and knowing oneself even better. Suppress your temptation to spew vitriol. Dragging an adversary into court and suing also is not an option. The playing field is not a courtroom. One cannot litigate a solution to a nuclear crisis. Resolution requires a deft diplomatic hand. It demands astuteness, fairness and acceptance in finding and shaping a compromise.

It is not clear that Trump is up to the task. It is no more clear that his unnamed future advisers, successors and generals would be up to it. Trump certainly has not yet made a convincing case that we could sleep soundly with him at the helm.