Democracy & Elections

A Two-Person Rule for Ordering the Use of Nuclear Weapons, Even for POTUS?

Herb Lin
Wednesday, November 9, 2016, 2:54 PM

The election has made me contemplate the following question: should even the President of the United States, regardless of party or the individual involved, have the unilateral authority to order the use of nuclear weapons under all possible circumstances?

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The election has made me contemplate the following question: should even the President of the United States, regardless of party or the individual involved, have the unilateral authority to order the use of nuclear weapons under all possible circumstances?

In the era that the Constitution was written, it made sense for Presidents to have the immediate authority to use military force to repel foreign invasion. But the only circumstance today in which decisions about using nuclear weapons need to be made in minutes is a scenario involving launch-on-warning (LOW) for the ICBM force. In all other circumstances, modern communications systems should be able to link the President in a timely way to a second person who would have to concur in the use of nuclear weapons, say, for example, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense.

Two interesting questions here: First, could such a scheme be implemented constitutionally? Second, what is involved for implementing the scheme so that it is technically impossible to bypass the 2-person rule involving the President in all scenarios aside from the LOW scenario? (It would greatly simplify the technical design if we got rid of the ICBM force, and there are other reasons to do that, but maybe not having ICBMs is not an absolutely necessary condition.)

Anyone want to work on this problem with me?

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Herb Lin

Herb Lin

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Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in and knowledgeable about the use of offensive operations in cyberspace, especially as instruments of national policy. In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

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