Everybody Panic: No One Can Stop Trump From Using Nuclear Weapons

Fortunately, Trump’s no Caesar yet, as the Washington Post’s Alex Wellerstein has a meltdown in the Era of Trump

No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will be briefed on the procedures for how to activate the U.S. nuclear arsenal, if he hasn’t already learned about them.

All year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of people was one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. She cut an ad along the same lines. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — also said they didn’t think he could be trusted with the launch codes.

That’s funny. Because enough people in the States that mattered ignored the bleating and voted to make Trump president. Deal with it.

Now they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.

Perhaps Democrats should have nominated someone else who could have beaten Trump, instead of engaging in Trump Derangement Syndrome based on unhinged feelings of future doom.

Wellerstein goes on to explain exactly why only the President can initiate the launch of nuclear weapons, an interesting read from just an informational point of view, before ending with

The people who set up the current command-and-control system did believe there was a check in place: elections. Don’t want an insane president to have nuclear weapons? Don’t put one in office. But this isn’t necessarily much of a check — even rational presidents have bad days; even high-functioning people succumb to mental illness or substance abuse. (snip)

Congress ceded a considerable amount of power to the presidency in 1946. Seventy years later, maybe it is time lawmakers took some of it back.

So, now that Trump will soon be President, Things Must Change. In 2008, a demagogue with delusions of grandeur and a belief in the extreme power of the Executive Office and the will to use it was elected, a guy with no actual executive experience and penchant for destroying political opponents, yet, these same weenies writing for news orgs felt no need to worry about him using nuclear weapons. I guess it has to do with the notion that Obama wouldn’t want to irradiate all the golf courses.

Fortunately, Trump is no Caesar

Yeah, TDS in full. After eight years of a true imperial presidency.

Crossed at Right Wing News.