The Washington Post does a Perspective piece on a sobering scenario that most of us would not think possible, but has worried a LOT of military people in this country….
That is the fact that Donald Trump , as President, CAN technically launch American nuclear armed ballistic missiles actually at ANY time he wants to without anyone’s oversight….
Response to a nuclear attack against America WOULD be time limited….
But NO ONE envisioned having a President with this capability living in an Alternate Universe…..
It IS something we SHOULD be concerned, NO, Worried about….
We ARE dealing with man whose sanity has been question by those who have worked for him up close….
President Trump abruptly announced Dec. 23 he was removing Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in January, two months before his planned departure.
The reaction to Mattis’s resignation, however, could open the door for the new Congress to create long-overdue legal barriers preventing the president from initiating a nuclear strike. Such a step could be implemented without any negative impact on U.S. security or that of our allies….
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Even informed observers are surprised to learn the president can order the use of nuclear weapons without the input — or consent — of the secretaries of Defense or State, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the vice president. They only have a role in the presidential launch protocol if the president has given prior approval for them to be notified and solicits their advice. Otherwise, none of these people would need to be involved or informed that the president has decided to use a nuclear weapon.
Under standard procedure, an attempt would be made to contact key national security officials, but in some real-world and exercise scenarios, it has proven impossible to tie them into a quickly convened emergency teleconference. Should he wish, the president could exclude all of them, and even bypass the primary designated adviser — the four-star general in charge of U.S. strategic forces — by ordering a low-ranking on-duty emergency operations officer at the Pentagon or elsewhere to transmit a launch order directly to the executing commanders of strategic U.S. submarines, silo-based missiles and bombers.
Trump could have learned all this in a briefing about nuclear weapons shortly after he took office, and his military aide, ever at his side, could explain and assist in issuing a direct order to a lower-level officer at any time.
Even if Mattis had been with Trump at a time of nuclear crisis, his resignation letter drives home the fact that Trump might very well have simply ignored his counsel. Trump, as he is proving in stark terms, listens only to himself. And any attempt by another person to physically block the president from issuing a launch order would probably result in his or her removal by the Secret Service. It is delusional and fundamentally undemocratic to think that our strongest check on a president bent on initiating nuclear war without justifiable cause might be a defense secretary trying to keep the president from communicating his launch authority using the so-called Gold Codes.
image of the Nuclear ‘football’…NBC News.Com