
Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age - _pius
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2011/02/an_unsung_hero_of_the_nuclear_age.single.html
======
pdonis
I'm a bit confused by one thing in this story: it never mentions the two man
rule:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-
man_rule)

The President cannot order the use of nuclear weapons on his own; he can only
issue the order jointly with the Secretary of Defense. The article mentions
that Nixon's SecDef asked people to "check with him" before carrying out
orders from Nixon, which may be a sort of garbled reference to the two man
rule, but if so it's _very_ garbled.

Whether this rule actually answers Maj. Hering's question is a separate issue.
But I find it disappointing (though unfortunately not surprising--journalists
often get things like this wrong) that the article repeatedly talks as though
a single person can issue the order, when that's not the case.

~~~
ersii
I'm not sure where that fits in either, but the point I took away from the
story is; Don't think too hard about Nixon. It was clear or at least not as
unclear, that he was not in his best mental condition. One of the problems is,
what about the current head of US state? How would you know if he/she isn't in
his best condition?

Regarding the two-man rule, my idea of the "Two Person Concept" is to prevent
that a single operator would launch an attack by himself or in "error"
(whatever that constitutes, I do not know). I interpret Major Hering's
question as a separate issue from the "Two Person Concept".

~~~
pdonis
_what about the current head of US state? How would you know if he /she isn't
in his best condition?_

But that is, in fact, one of the reasons for the two man rule: so that just
one person being insane isn't enough. Two people would have to be insane: the
President and the Secretary of Defense. That at least provides _some_
reduction of risk.

 _I interpret Major Hering 's question as a separate issue from the "Two
Person Concept"._

At levels below the National Command Authority (NCA, i.e., the President and
the SecDef), I agree; the two man rule is just to ensure that, at each level
through which the launch order passes, two people have to agree that it's a
"valid" launch order, where "valid" means it really does come from NCA and it
really was issued intentionally by NCA. The two man rule at all those
subordinate levels doesn't tell the two people to ask whether NCA was sane
when the order was issued; that's a separate issue.

But at the NCA level, as I noted above, the two man rule does add at least
some measure of safeguarding against the President himself being insane,
because the SecDef has to agree to _issue_ the order in the first place. That
is, he's not just agreeing that yes, the President really does want to launch
nuclear weapons; he's agreeing that _he_ , himself, as a separate decision
maker, wants to launch nuclear weapons. So if the SecDef is sane, and there
isn't a sane reason to launch nuclear weapons, he won't agree to the launch
order, even if an insane President wants him to.

It's also worth noting that at the next level down (the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who has to receive the launch order from the President and
SecDef), they _are_ , as I understand it, supposed to exercise _some_ judgment
about whether the order is valid based on circumstances. For example, suppose
an insane President fires his (sane) SecDef when the latter refuses to assent
to a launch order. There is an ordered list of people who are "next in line"
if someone up the chain is killed or is unavailable; so the President calls
the next person on the list and asks _them_ to assent to the launch order.
However, even if that person agrees (let's suppose they're insane too), when
the two of them transmit the order to the Chairman of the JCS, his first
question should be, where's the SecDef? I fired him, says the President.
Assuming the Chairman is sane, that in itself would be enough to invalidate
the launch order; the President can't just fire the SecDef--he's confirmed by
the Senate, and there's a formal process that has to be gone through. (The
same goes for all the people on the list, btw--they all have to be confirmed
by the Senate, and they can't be summarily fired by the President without due
process.)

Of course these sorts of scenarios are the stuff of which thrillers are made
(for example, Tom Clancy's _The Sum of All Fears_ ); but the point is that
officers _are_ supposed to exercise judgment. Which does mean that Major
Hering was entirely justified in asking the question he asked.

~~~
garmega
_the President can 't just fire the SecDef--he's confirmed by the Senate, and
there's a formal process that has to be gone through. (The same goes for all
the people on the list, btw--they all have to be confirmed by the Senate, and
they can't be summarily fired by the President without due process.)_

The rest of your comment is fine, but actually the president _can_ fire any
cabinet officer or (almost) any non-judicial appointment at any time. The
Supreme Court has agreed that the president has this authority.

Granted, the appointment must be confirmed by the Senate in the first place,
but the Senate does not hold a veto on the president removing any of these
appointees _after_ confirmation. The impeachment and trial of President Andrew
Johnson was based on Congress' attempt to keep him from firing appointees, and
that law was later ruled unconstitutional.

~~~
pdonis
_actually the president can fire any cabinet officer or (almost) any non-
judicial appointment at any time. The Supreme Court has agreed that the
president has this authority._

Hm, yes, I see on reading about the Myers v. United States decision that, as
usual, Supreme Court jurisprudence makes less sense than it ought to. :-)

I still think, though, that a JCS Chairman in the position I described would
question (and would be right to question) a President who conveniently fired a
SecDef who did not concur with a nuclear launch order.

------
gpcz
Why did the military require human beings to turn the keys if they expected
people (and weeded out people unwilling) to turn the key blindly? A wire would
have been much more efficient...

~~~
gus_massa
Humans are probably more difficult to hack (I hope) and more resistant to
noise (I hope).

A weak ago, there was a discussion about the “Letters of last resort”
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7165048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7165048)
(56 points, 6 days ago, 50 comments). They are secret instructions for nuclear
submarine commanders in case of something killed the whole UK government.

From Wikipedia:

> _According to Peter Hennessy 's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the
> Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander
> would determine if the British government continues to function includes,
> amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues
> broadcasting._

This kind of safeguards is easier to implement in humans than in automatic
systems. How do you distinguish from the submarine the lack of communication
caused by a nuclear attack from a problem caused by a massive electricity
outage and a big fire in the BBC building? Maybe you can listen to some Canada
and Australia signals to hear if there is a problem.

~~~
gaius
It is not hard to hack a human, it happens every day - we know it by the term
_radicalization_ these days. There are people who abandoned comfortable
Western lives to fight jihads and become suicide bombers. Another term for it
is _brainwashing_. In the Cold War people became _defectors_. You can hack a
human by speaking to them or by showing them some text to read, techniques
thousands of years old.

------
magic_haze
Does anyone know what TempleOSV2 is talking about? I can't reply to his
comment in this thread because it's marked as dead, but it sounds very
interesting.

~~~
pygy_
This account is used by the author of "The Temple Operanting System"[0], who's
schizophrenic.

The first and the last two sections of his post are similar to his usual
writings (the fourth one comes out of a Markov chain). The second and third
ones are unusual, but it's probably gibberish too.

[0] [http://www.templeos.org/](http://www.templeos.org/) IMO both a work of
art and a technical achievement. See my sibling comment for a review.

~~~
gus_massa
The second part is a quote from:
[http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nist_beacon.cfm](http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nist_beacon.cfm)

The third part is very similar to the random example in:
[https://beacon.nist.gov/home](https://beacon.nist.gov/home)

It’s apparently unrelated to the current article.

~~~
pygy_
Not gibberish then. Thanks for pointing this out.

------
DanielBMarkham
Nuclear weapons are extremely dangerous, not just for the people being
targeted but for all mankind. If I had my way they'd never be used. And I want
to respect this author's opinion -- after all, they wrote a book about it, and
they've been kind enough to write an article.

Having said that, this article reminds me of somebody trying hard to work a
problem, giving up, then saying the problem is stupid. That is, trying to work
out moral agency in a world where one person can kill hundreds of millions of
others, the author (and those like him), give up and pronounce the question
wrong -- that is, we should not live in such a world.

Well, that's fine and dandy, but that's the world we live in. So I think we
can take "no person should be able to order a nuclear counterstrike" off the
table right away. The author doesn't have much to say except running out of
gas from waving their arms around so much. This is unfortunate, because we
live in a world where more and more individuals have the capability to kill
huge numbers of people. Trying to limit the discussion to nuclear weapons does
the entire topic a severe injustice. (Though it might sell some more books.
Hard to say.) And then effectively giving up and saying that the world we live
in shouldn't be like it is does the entire topic disservice.

------
ufmace
It's a challenging issue, all right. The important part that I don't see many
people discuss is the nature of international relations, most of which is
based on how other national leaders and decision-makers will perceive your
actions.

Consider: North Korea is run by madmen who have at least some primitive
nuclear capability. They regularly make wild accusations and threats against
the US. Say they do manage to mount a nuclear device on a long-range rocket.
What's to hold them back against launching it at a major US city? Whenever
people discuss North Korean (or Iranian or...) nuclear capability, the usual
line is that we don't need to worry about it that much, since it would
obviously be crazy for them to use them against the US, or any other nuclear
power. What is it that makes it crazy, when they've already done so many
terrible things to their own people?

It's crazy because, according to MAD, any such attack, or even a specific
threat to make such an attack, would result in a full-scale launch against
their country. Millions of casualties, the total destruction of their culture
and way of life. Everyone in the world, most especially leaders in North
Korea, and China, fully believes that the US will carry out this threat if
attacked with nuclear weapons.

Now, let's say Iran manages to detonate a primitive nuclear device in a
coastal US city. The textbook MAD reply is a total destruction of every
Iranian city. You can make the case that this is crazy on it's face - there is
no imminent threat to stop, and those millions of people who would die didn't
do anything to deserve it. Say that what Hering and the article author seem to
want happens - that no weapons are launched, and a more measured, conventional
reply is used. What do you think the North Korean leaders will think then? Or
China and Russia? That's the more important question to ask.

After that, might North Korea think that they can use a nuclear attack to try
and extract some sort of diplomatic concession from us? They're a harder nut
to crack with conventional weapons, and they have more firm backing from
China. If they get the idea that our MAD policy is toothless, they might try
something that could lead to a much greater war, even possibly a much bigger
nuclear war.

We've been living in a world for a long time now where the Kim Jong-uns of the
world have very good reason to be terrified of using nuclear weapons against
the US. Are you willing to see what happens if that is no longer true?

There are terrible people in this world who are prepared to do terrible things
to everything we hold dear. To keep the world safe and stable, those people
must believe that we will do even more terrible things to them if the
situation calls for it. Keeping that belief in place may sometimes require us
to actually do some terrible things ourselves,

~~~
abstrakraft
You keep using that term MAD. I do not think it means what you think it means.

You seem to imply that it's simply a policy of retaliating against any first
strike with massive and lethal force. In fact, MAD, as a theory of nuclear
deterrence, requires creating a situation in which a first strike from either
side results in the total destruction of both sides, that is, mutually assured
destruction. To be workable, this requires two things not present in the
situations you describe (North Korea and Iran, or any other rogue state):

1\. a rational enemy, i.e. an enemy for whom death is a bad thing. As much as
American propaganda tried to paint the Soviets as godless monsters, they
respected them as rational. Fundamentalists and North Koreans, not so much.

2\. strategic parity - a nuke or two held together by duct tape, while
certainly capable of causing much destruction, hardly gives anyone the
capability of assuring the destruction of the US.

~~~
the_af
Why would you say Iran fails the first condition, i.e. that they aren't "a
rational enemy"? They seem pretty rational to me. I can't be sure about North
Korea, but for all the crazy news about them, they probably would behave like
a rational enemy as well.

~~~
abstrakraft
If Kim Jong-Un was faced with personal defeat (threat of losing power), I have
no doubt that he would sacrifice his citizens to go out in a blaze of glory
worthy of the Great Successor. In a sense, he's sacrificing his citizens now
to support his lavish lifestyle, only he's doing it one starving farmer at a
time rather than the whole country in one flash.

I'll defer arguing the rationality of the ruling power of Iran to someone with
more knowledge. Bear in mind, my comment wasn't a slur against the people of
Iran, but the government and military, i.e. those in the chain of command of
potential nuclear weapons.

~~~
the_af
"Starving one farmer at a time" is evil but rational (and, it can be argued,
is also done in some West-friendly countries). However, I very seriously doubt
Kim Jong-Un would be able to "go out in a blaze of glory" in an apocalyptic
scenario. Most likely, North Korea as a whole would act rationally and he
would be taken out by a military junta before he destroys everything. No
matter how evil he seems, he must have a rational entourage. Even Hitler had
one. Stuff simply _has_ to get done in NK; even if the only plan is "blackmail
other countries to give us money", do you not see that's a perfectly
_rational_ plan?

As for Iran, I understood you were talking about their government. Nothing
I've heard of them so far strikes me as irrational -- just hostile to some
Western powers.

We must stop confusing "hostile" with "irrational", that's all I'm saying.

------
gojomo
"When the President does it, that means it is not crazy."

~~~
lostlogin
Even when he is drinking and bragging about his ability to kill 70 million in
25 minutes. It's alarming alright.

~~~
Ygg2
World obliterated by a drunken president. I'm not sure if it's alarming or
hilarious.

------
throwwit
Another unsung... Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-
europe-24280831](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24280831)

~~~
Nux
We've been "singing" about this guy several times around here and there on the
Internet and he even made it on BBC. Not to say we shouldn't keep doing it,
but just that the term "unsung" may not apply so well any more. :)

------
peterpathname
in my opinion, no order to deploy nuclear weapons can ever possible come from
a sane commander. any such order should be refused.

~~~
Houshalter
Well nuclear missiles _can_ be used on military targets, or targeted on
infrastructure or to strategically poison areas with radiation. I think what
you object to is MAD.

As terrible as it is, it does likely prevent wars from happening in the first
place. Even if the world is stable now, it may not always be so and it wasn't
in the past.

