Richard Miniter , CONTRIBUTOR
“Like giving a hand grenade to a drunk monkey” is how one veteran political reporter explained it to me, at a party on Saturday night. That’s his colorful take on the dangers of giving President Donald Trump access to the nation’s nuclear codes.
This is a surprisingly widely shared view up and down the Acela Corridor. Go to a cocktail party, black-tie dinner or hang out in a network “green room” and you will hear some variant of this nuclear worry.
In reality, this view is smug, superficial and completely misinformed. It is not even original to this presidential race.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough offers the account, hotly debated by the Trump campaign, that an unnamed foreign-policy advisor met with Trump and the candidate asked the would-be advisor three times about nuclear weapons. “If we have them, why don’t we use them?” Trump supposedly said. First of all, there is no reason to believe this anonymous account. Why doesn’t the accuser come forward into the sunlight, provide the day and time of the meeting and offer some proof that he even met the candidate? His anonymity is, itself, suspicious. This is a classic journalistic example of a story “too good to check.”
Second, even if the quote were accurate, and I doubt it is, there are plenty of contexts that could render it benign. As any arms-control observer can tell you, the way a nation uses nuclear weapons is by implicitly threatening to use them, not by actually detonating them. It is not an accident that the only time that atomic bombs were ever dropped was in 1945, when only one nation had them. Once the nuclear club became multi-national, every atomic nation knew it invited immediate and devastating retaliation if it ever launched one. The classic Cold War thought experiment: imagine a locked room with nine men, each pointing pistols at one other. Can any one of them fire first and win? Perhaps Trump was speculating that America could use its implied nuclear power as negotiating lever as the Soviets once did and as the North Koreans do today. Even the Soviets did not verbally threaten nuclear war; they would simply deploy nuclear-armed ships or planes to certain regions and the point would be made. Again, without the context, the alleged Trump remark is impossible to evaluate.
Then there is Sen. Marco Rubio’s statement that America can’t give “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.”
That is self-evidently true, but it is not how decisions to deploy nuclear weapons are made in the United States. The American president can’t unilaterally send nuclear missiles to targets he personally chooses. For more than 50 years, America was continuously refined a system of checks-and-balances to prevent accidental or impulsive launches. Given the stakes, this is how any responsible nation should operate. If Sen. Rubio, and his fellow worriers, thought about it for a minute, they would realize that president gives his approval (after a series of decisions works its way through the military command structure and the secretary of defense) and, then, another series of checks-and-balances clicks into motion before the actual missile is launched. It ends with two military officers simultaneously pushing buttons to fire a missile. It may only take four minutes, as Hillary Clinton said recently, but it involves dozens of independent people, any one of whom can put a stop to the launch process.
Yet reason has flown, while missiles have not. Huffington Post recently expressed great surprise that Sen. Ron Johnson isn’t worried about giving President Trump the nuclear codes. The writer apparently thought that the other senators were actually worried.
This “nuclear codes” worry is actually a very old argument that, in one form or another, has been flung against almost every Republican presidential nominee since 1964. That’s when the LBJ campaign aired the infamous “daisy ad,” that featured a little girl picking flowers who is vaporized by an atomic mushroom cloud. The not-so subtle message? A vote for Barry Goldwater is a vote for nuclear war because he was a dangerous extremist. Hillary Clinton, incredibly, recently brought back the “daisy ad” star to repeat the message, this time regarding Trump.
The same argument was trotted out against Ronald Reagan, who worrywarts called a “nuclear cowboy” and a warmonger. “What a strange nuclear place Ronald Reagan has brought himself and the rest of us to. Just a few years ago the air was thick with denunciations of him as a nuclear cowboy, the mad bomber of the West, the relentless nuclear armer,” Stephen S. Rosenfeld, a Washington Post writer, noted in 1988. The reporter was surprised that Reagan had succeeded in an array of arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union, despite being dogged by liberal critics as a nut who was eager to drop the big one. (Indeed, Reagan might have succeeded partly because his critics gave him such a fearsome reputation.) Reagan knew how his benighted critics saw him and once joked about “outlawing Russia forever” and the “bombing begins in five minutes.”
Whoever wins the White House, there is no need to worry he or she will let the missiles fly. And the insiders—reporters, senators and so on—know it. This is cynical argument meant to scare the rubes into voting for another candidate. It is not a worry that should move the mind of any serious person.
A friend recently recently returned from a U.S. Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota, where crews launch planes that carry nuclear missiles. All of the air crews, that she talked to, say that they are voting for Trump. If they are not worried about Trump and nuclear codes, why should we?
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