Today, Explained - Six Easy Steps to Nuclear War

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Today we launch our show, but it turns out it's a lot easier to launch a nuclear weapon. Vox's Alex Ward walks us through the six easy steps and tells Sean Rameswaram about the time we accidentally dropped a nuke on North Carolina. Twice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, thanks for subscribing to Today Explained. We cannot wait to share our show with you. But first, because this is a podcast, I want to tell you about a mattress. Actually many. Check out Mattress Firm because they've got tons of mattress brands. They're being very inclusive. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep. It's President's Day.

Fun fact about the president, he's got this second shadow, a military officer who follows him around at all times with instructions on how to eviscerate the planet with nuclear weapons. Wherever the president goes, so goes this person with this atomic briefcase. Except the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Last night, Jonathan Swan broke a story for Axios about the president's November visit to China. According to his sources, when the military aide with that briefcase

tried to enter the Great Hall with the president, several Chinese security officials blocked his entry. John Kelly, chief of staff, told the military aid to keep walking in, follow the president. Chinese security grabbed Kelly, and the Secret Service ended up tackling a Chinese security guard to the ground. In that moment, the United States nuclear plans almost fell into the hands of some random security guards. And it turns out, that might not even be the hands of some random security guards. And it turns out, that might not even be the scariest thing about our nuclear system. Some people say there's an even bigger problem at the top.

Can the president really order a nuclear attack without any controls? This is Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat. That question is asked more and more by the American people. Senator Cardin was speaking at a hearing about the nuclear chain of command, a hearing that was called by Republican Senator Bob Corker because both parties are wondering if the president might be a little trigger happy. I'm quoting the president in his August interview. North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. After that interview, the president said he would destroy North Korea.

And then there was that tweet about the big button. That is frightening. The system as it is set up today provides the president with the sole and ultimate authority to use nuclear weapons. So what's the system? And what's in that briefcase? How does the president of the United States

launch a nuclear weapon? I'm Sean Ramos-Verm and this is Today Explained. I think people assume based on the movies that like the president goes, give me the button and then the president hits the button. US nuclear arsenal is capable of destroying each of your countries 14 times over and all at the push of a button. Let's nuke the bastards. It's not as easy as that. There are some safeguards, but it's not so far off from that being true either. This is Alex Ward. I am the defense and security reporter for the foreign team here at Vox. So let's break this down. Step by step, what is the process of launching a nuclear weapon?

Step one, the president decides a nuclear strike is necessary. That actually puts a whole process into motion. And the process, to be sure, is not, I want to launch a bomb today. It hits a button, bomb launches. There is no button. What we do have is the nuclear football. The nuclear football.

The football is literally like an aluminum 45-pound briefcase that's leather clad. This is the thing that apparently caused the whole skirmish in China, right? Yeah. And this is carried by a member of the U.S. military who's always by the president's side. Step two, a U.S. military officer opens the football. Within it is basically like a menu of, do you want to strike Moscow today? Do you want to strike Beijing? Do you want to strike Pyongyang? When you open it, does it look like this? Like I'm looking at a mixer right here with all these doodads and screens. There's flashing buttons. Is it that kind of thing?

It's just full of papers that have instructions for the president on what he wants to do. At some point, he's going to have to make a phone call. But this is not like a high-tech, super sophisticated system that he hits a couple buttons or switches a couple keys and things start flying. Do we know why it's called a football? So it comes from a former nuclear plan called dropkick. And what do you dropkick a football? Step three, Trump talks with military and civilian advisors. So what he does is he calls the National Military Command Center, which is basically the war room inside the Pentagon. Technically, Trump only has to talk to one person, the director of that office. And Trump would basically say, I want to hit X target with X weaponry. Okay.

That said, it's widely believed that the president would take an extra couple of seconds to talk to a couple of other people. One would at least be this commander of U.S. Strategic Command. I would assume, though, Trump would also want to talk to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joe Dunford, but he doesn't have to. He really only has to decide, I'm doing this thing. And again, all of this, what we talked about, takes like a couple of minutes, Tops. Because we're still at just step three, which was decision, football, talk to advisors. Step four, the president gives the official order to strike. Okay. We've talked about the football. Yep. Now we're gonna talk about the biscuit. The biscuit.

The biscuit is, and I'm not joking, our entire system basically depends upon this, a laminated piece of paper. No. That the president has to have at all times with verification codes. This is like when I log into Gmail and it's like, what's this two-step verification? Yeah, but it's like almost less than that. Great. There's like a military code. It's like Echo Bravo or Bravo Charlie or whatever it may be.

Okay, yeah. And that's supposed to be the code that the military center, right, that would go and give all the orders, knows, oh, this is the president calling and not like some imposter. Okay. So this is a glossy piece of paper

called a biscuit. The biscuit. The biscuit. The biscuit. Step five, the crews prepare the attack. And that's our nuclear triad. So you've got planes in the sky. You've got ships, and actually ships, but really like submarines. And then you've got the land-based missiles,

and they're all over the country in places like Montana and Wyoming, etc., etc. Step six, missiles fly towards the enemy. Step six, the missiles fly. And then we'll see if they hit. Okay. Again, this whole process would take probably a couple of minutes tops. We have a nuclear monarchy in the US,

so it's completely dependent upon the president's feelings and then just the logistics of like, is the football near the president and is the card in his pocket? That's the system. It strikes me as sort of inexplicable that at the same time they're running these drills and surely maintaining these systems, there haven't been like real updates. Like these are the most lethal weapons the world has ever known. And yet the president's carrying around a piece of laminated paper that he could lose at any moment.

And that's how it works? That's how it's worked for decades. This whole process sounds dusty as fuck. Like, are they ever going to update any of this stuff? So that's sort of one of the questions, right? Is that, like, will the White House decide to do it? Does it need congressional authorization?

We just haven't touched this question because we haven't needed to for a really, really long time. Congress can barely just fund the government. Our military can barely run itself at this point for multiple reasons that are also Congress's problems. So like, this is not a top priority. And I don't think it will be anytime soon. So with such a dusty system, has anyone ever dropped the ball? So Carter was rumored to have lost the biscuit in his dry cleaning. Clinton just lost it for months and told nobody.

Wait, how do you keep a laminated piece of paper in your dry cleaning? Like when he probably had it in his like blazer pocket and just handed it away. Oh, it's small. I'm thinking of like an eight and a half by 11. No, it's like a very, it like fits in your pocket. Oh, it's like a business card sized piece of paper. Reagan in 1981, when he got shot in the assassination attempt, he was taken to George Washington University Hospital and the doctors ripped his clothes off.

And in the clothes was the biscuit and it was lost. And they found it like in a plastic bag in the hospital much later. And the FBI held it as evidence. The president's supposed to have it at all times. This is like human folly at its best. It's completely dependent upon one, at this point, man, just to have this thing just in case. And if it's not there, then the system doesn't work. So like, let's say Trump has lost it. North Korea is attacking America. It's possible Trump will be like, I don't know where it is and I

can't respond in kind. So how close have we actually gotten um one of the stories that like Zbigniew Brzezinski who was um the latest Zbigniew Brzezinski now who was Carter's national security advisor he was famously woken up one morning he was called and they're like we see missiles flying at the United States and he had he like legally I think it was like three minutes before he had to call Carter okay and in the time he's like deciding whether this is a mistake, whether it's a blip, were we catching the wrong thing? He ultimately decides it's a mistake and he goes back to bed.

He was right. Mm-hmm. There weren't nuclear weapons launched at us. But imagine what if he had decided otherwise, right? He could have said, the Soviets are doing it. Right. We're launching back

and he's going to tell Carter about it. And what's Carter going to do at like four in the morning, whenever it was if his national security advisor is like i know while you were sleeping we were under attack he's like all right the game on you know so that's a possibility well he's going to do nothing because he lost the biscuit oh yeah if he lost that's true if he didn't have the biscuit classic carter but seriously there are points in this system where people can stand up to the president right so that's this is where it gets really really tricky i mean the reason to talk to advisors president, right? So this is where it gets really, really tricky.

I mean, the reason to talk to advisors is for them to say, this is not a good idea. Or, and this is when we start to get into some real gray area, the military advisors or civilian advisors could think that the attack order is illegal. And here's what I mean by that. It's possible that, let's say, Trump wakes up tomorrow and goes, I'm doing it, right?

But the U.S. isn't under attack. Then what's the point of sending a nuclear weapon? Some military officers could say, that is an illegal strike, Mr. President, and we cannot carry that out. Because military officers are duty-bound to, one, follow the commander-in-chief, but also the law. John Hyten said at the Halifax Forum last year that if the president gave me an illegal order, I would push back and say, Mr. President, that was illegal. But then what? Trump could fire him? On the spot.

On the spot. And keep replacing him with people until someone carries out his order. That is possible. Coming up after the break, someone in this process has to have a button, right? We found that person. This is Today Explained. Are you struggling to get to sleep? If so, the fine people at Mattress Firm want to help.

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I'm Bruce Blair. Bruce is a researcher at Princeton who's really into nukes. And at some point in my early life was responsible for firing up to 50 long-range ballistic missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. You mean like test missiles? Well, I was in an underground launch control center in Montana, and my job was to carry out a launch checklist that took about one minute. Our job was to wait for the actual order to fire. But, of course, that order never came or we wouldn't be here right now having this conversation probably.

Okay, good. So the president tweeted about being the guy with the finger on the very big button, which we've established does not actually exist. You were the person sitting next to the button with the codes, with the keys, with the safe. I sure was. Is there a part of the process where you just pick up the phone and call someone and go like, hey, are we sure? Nope. There's nothing in the checklist. I think of it as a rote enactment of a prepared script. And if missiles are streaking toward the United States at four miles per second, there's very little time to ponder the cosmos. Do you see sort of obvious blind spots and maybe inefficiencies? Does it have that? and in fact virtually non-existent, is at the top of the chain of command at the level of the U.S.

president, who has essentially carte blanche authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. It's a system that gives too much authority to a president who may be behaving irrationally. So it sounds like the issue, the main issue, is that there's this lack of safeguards at the top. So if we wanted as a country to give the president less power in all of this, how would we actually do that? So not too many people are calling for fundamental change to the way the system works now when we're under attack. with fresh ideas is the situation in which a president may initiate the use of nuclear weapons without apparent cause. A president going off the deep end, the secretary of defense should be in the chain of command. Maybe have the Congress responsible for approving the first use of nuclear weapons by declaring war.

We want to be sure that an order from the president would be considered a legal order. Trevor Burrus You were literally in the hot seat, the last person in this process of launching a nuclear weapon potentially. What is that insane power and sort of responsibility feel like? Well, even when you're 24 or 5, the power to fire up to 50 missiles, each of which had a huge nuclear weapon, it's awesome. And it's scary. You cannot make a single mistake.

If you, for example, were to enter the wrong number into your launch control center computer during that one-minute launch checklist that you're carrying out, it could spell the difference between attacking remote missile silos in Soviet Siberia or destroying Moscow. You follow the checklist that kind of screens out the emotion and the panic that would otherwise exist. Where there is a lot of emotion would be if there's a buildup. You go to higher and higher levels of alert. This was a situation that I was in during the Arab-Israeli war when we received the order to prepare to fire our missiles. Bruce is referring to the war in 1973.

And that meant having the launch keys in our grubby little paws and strapped into our chairs and ready to rock and roll from the blast wave that would rock our shock absorbers and waiting to see whether that launch order came or not for many, many hours. That was truly intense, particularly since we didn't really know what was going on in the Middle East. My crewmate and I would sort of look at each other and say, what the heck is going on here? Are we going to, is this the end? Is this the end? Were we going to be asked or told to fire

these weapons? Yeah, it's an existential moment in life. Not long forgotten. I'm sure. The best part of waking up is escaping your dream about being nuked by North Korea. That's my friend Stephanie Fu singing something she tweeted.

Stephanie legitimately loses sleep worrying about our propensity for nuclear war. And in case she wasn't scared enough, and for all the Stephanie's out there, we thought it would be really fun to just have some more sundry, terrifying nuclear facts. So once again, here's Vox's Alex Ward. The first one that I always like to point to is January 1961, where a U.S. B-52 bomber broke up over North Carolina and two nuclear weapons that it was carrying dropped and actually hit Earth. What?

Yeah. One of the bombs, its parachute went. In that moment, pins fell out, and those pins were needed to make sure the thing detonated. It didn't detonate. Everyone's safe. The second one, the parachute didn't go, hit Earth really hard, but the crash actually broke the mechanism required for the bomb to blow up.

Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, what else you got? There was also a case in the Soviet Union where they averted a potential nuclear disaster. So there was a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. Okay. And on September 26, 1983, while he's on duty,

one of the computers warned that five missiles were launched from the United States. He has to make a decision. Is this real or is it not? If it's real, they have to react, right? Sure. So after about five minutes, he decides it's not true. The computer's made a mistake.

And he admits to his dying day. He says he called it a gut decision. And he says it was a 50-50 call. Wow. Last nuclear fact. One of the codes in order for a nuclear weapon to explode that we would have launched, the code was

0000 0000 I don't know, it's my email password, man. It blew up my spot. Alex Ward writes about defense for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. I host Today Explained for Vox. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Thank you. too. This podcast is produced in association with Stitcher, and it's part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Sean, it's Julie Bogan, your social media manager. It's your first show, and you better not forget to plug the Twitter account, today underscore explained. That's today underscore

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