Thanks to his off-the-cuff, bellicose reactions to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, President Trump has generated controversy over what authority a president has to unilaterally deploy nuclear weapons. A recent Senate hearing attracted significant public attention, but failed to resolve the controversy.
This debate, however, is not new, but one that traces back to the start of the atomic age. Ironically, given that North Korea has spurred the current concern, an earlier conflict between the United States and North Korea helped shape the current structure of our nuclear command. In that case, control of America’s nuclear arsenal was determined by military and diplomatic needs, not by a clearly defined legal structure or debates about the ideal way to handle nuclear weapons. The same will hold true today.
At the heart of this debate are a series of questions: Can any president make a decision to launch nuclear weapons on his own? Is there any check on his authority over nuclear weapons within the U.S. chain of command? Neither the Constitution nor any specific law provides answers. Instead, as historians Alex Wellerstein and Avner Cohen pointed out in The Washington Post, the president’s power in this area “results from a series of Cold War-era decisions made secretly by the executive branch and the U.S. military.”
When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, using nuclear weapons was one of the first military options considered by President Harry Truman and his advisers.