The Overlooked Threat of Nuclear War
By Andrew Quist
The steroid Dexamethasone is known to cause confusion, mania, and even psychosis, so it is distressing to know that President Donald Trump, a man with sole authority to launch the US arsenal of nuclear weapons, did not cede authority to Vice President Mike Pence while he was on the drug for five days in early October for treatment for COVID-19. As nuclear weapons experts William Perry and Tom Collina have pointed out:
Mr. Trump has the absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, the president could unleash the equivalent of more than 10,000 Hiroshima bombs. He does not need a second opinion. The defense secretary has no say. Congress has no role. Yet it would mean the end of civilization as we know it.
The United States is unique among nuclear powers in placing control of nuclear weapons solely in one person’s hands—even in Russia, multiple officials are required to sign off on a nuclear weapons launch. Trump’s use of the mood-altering drug renewed worries among nuclear weapons analysts about the US’s policy of giving the president “sole authority” over these weapons. If an under-the-influence Trump were to order a nuclear strike, no one could stop him. It is true that military officers are trained to disobey an illegal order, but the nuclear attack plans in the president’s “nuclear football” are pre-vetted by White House lawyers, so they are already deemed to be legal.
The policy of “sole authority” is not just a problem because a president may be erratic or under the influence. There have been many false alarms over the decades that came close to triggering nuclear war. For instance, in 1983, Soviet radars sounded alarms for an incoming attack from American intercontinental ballistic missiles. The military officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided on his own that the warning was probably a computer error, and did not notify his superiors. At the time, the Soviet Union had a “launch on warning” policy, so Petrov very well may have single-handedly prevented nuclear holocaust.
We are always one decision away from annihilation, but we don’t think about it due to the psychological phenomenon known as the availability bias. The availability bias causes us to judge the likelihood or frequency of an event based on how easily we can recall examples from memory. Since hardly anyone alive today has experienced a nuclear attack, we struggle to imagine it actually happening. Out of sight, out of mind.
But current events make nuclear war a real possibility: the rogue nation North Korea has developed both nuclear bombs and missiles capable of delivering them, India is engaged in border disputes with two other nuclear powers—Pakistan and China—and Russia and the United States continue to point enough nukes at each other to destroy the world several times over.
While it can be difficult to overcome cognitive biases, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman are optimistic that we can negate the impact of the availability bias through careful, reasoned thinking. There are logical steps we can take to reduce the risk of nuclear war, such as updating treaties like the New START treaty, getting rid of land-based missiles, which can tempt an enemy into launching a first strike, and passing a law that requires that the president obtain congressional approval before using nuclear weapons in any circumstance other than an imminent attack. Above all, we must, as Barack Obama called for his speech at Prague in 2009, “take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.”
To learn more about how our psychology makes nuclear weapons use a dangerous possibility, read Paul Slovic and Herb Lin’s paper, “The Caveman and the Bomb in the Digital Age.”
Two recent books are also a wonderful resources for understanding the dangers nuclear weapons pose: The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg.