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Could President Trump Tweet Out the Nuclear Launch Codes?  The National Interest talked nuclear command and control with Professor Alex Wellerstein. 29 Apr 20, by Matthew Petti Follow Matthew Petti on Twitter

Professor Alex Wellerstein is one of the foremost authorities on nuclear command and control. A historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Wellerstein created the popular NUKEMAP tool for understanding the likely effects of a nuclear war, and has written extensively on the history of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

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  National Interest   spoke to Wellerstein about presidential authority, myths swirling around the “big red button,” and how a nuclear war might—and probably wouldn’t—unfold. Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for brevity and clarity. 

• “………… I’ve been thinking for awhile about what sort of circumstances would produce another nuclear weapon being used. I worry a lot about low-yield nuclear weapons, not just because they might lower the bar for escalation, but because they might then become a way in which they might be presented as the extreme option……The President has to give an order. It has to be received by a couple people who can receive it and act upon it. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of Strategic Command—these are people who seem to be the conduits. They take that order, the military, and then they relay that order onto the combatant commands….

We don’t have a system that’s designed to have gatekeepers for this order……

They [the military] already have built into their system clearly—and probably built into their legal guidance—the idea that lower yields are more usable. That’s going to make it much harder to push back, I imagine.What would it be in practice? I don’t know. What I worry about is situations where that ambiguity could result, plausibly, in ill-advised nuclear use. The consequences of being wrong about many decisions could be quite high, but the consequences of being wrong about nuclear weapons could be existential.

So it’s important to me that we think about these situations ahead of time, and even potentially set up a system where we’re pretty sure that nuclear weapons would not be used except under—as a last resort in the worst kinds of situations.

Last week, he said that is ordering the Navy to “shoot down and destroy” Iranian boats that get too close to U.S. ships, and then the Pentagon turned it into a reminder that “our ships retain the right of self-defense.”

Do you see any situations where the President says something ambiguous, and then the military has to figure out whether he meant to use nuclear weapons, or some other similarly drastic measure?……..

I do worry about—it’s somewhat clear that the President and the military have a complicated communications relationship.

There have a number of things that the President announced via Twitter, that he clearly did not get full consent from the military on or did not even inform them on…….