Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: First Use

  • Democracy, Hypocrisy, First Use

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    I’m an anthropologist. In my view, what holds the arms race in place and keeps it going is what Elaine Scarry has called a “mental architecture.” That mental architecture makes it seem natural and normal to many that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons exist on hair-trigger alert. How did that mental architecture arise?

    For over 30 years now, I’ve been in dialogue with nuclear-weapon scientists at both the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the Los Alamos National Lab. If you’re an anthropologist, you always try to be sympathetic to the people you study, to explain to others how their worldview makes sense. Many of these scientists have become friends whom I like and respect. But my writing about these scientists, and about American nuclear culture more generally, also asks how beliefs that seem to me mythical and profoundly mistaken became for weapons professionals and for the broader American public what the French social theorist Roland Barthes calls “falsely obvious.”

    Two of these myths are widely subscribed to by both liberals and conservatives. The two myths purport to explain why some countries can be trusted with nuclear weapons and some can never be, and lead many to believe that nuclear weapons protect a liberal democratic international order. They also lead many to take it for granted that the president of the United States can condemn North Korea for testing a missile the very same week that the US tests a ballistic missile, and no one says, “Wait a minute, isn’t that hypocritical? Isn’t there a double standard there?”

    The first myth is that the US is a democracy in the fullest sense of the word, and that nuclear weapons protect this democracy. When I say to my students, “You know the US is not really a democracy, right?” they say “You’re crazy, Professor.” They won’t even argue about it, because to them it’s obvious the US is a democracy.

    What is a democracy? The Oxford English Dictionary definition is it’s “government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole and is exercised either directly by them as in small republics of antiquity or by officers elected by them.”

    The US Constitution states that “Congress shall have power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land or water.” The OED definition and the US Constitution make clear that in a democracy, one autocratic figure should not have sole authority to declare war. But in reality, as President Nixon famously told a group of congressmen, “I can go in my office and pick up a telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead.” A president of the United States made that boast—there is nothing less democratic. As Elaine Scarry says, “A momentous shift in the nature of government, the home population’s power of and responsibility for self-defense, has been lifted away from them and condensed into the head of government.”

    The second myth is that the US is a modern country with the maturity and rationality to possess nuclear weapons, unlike developing countries, and unlike countries in the Global South. I call this way of looking at the world nuclear orientalism. It characterizes countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America as too infantile, too immature, and too irresponsible to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

    Nuclear orientalists—that is to say, most of us—see developing countries as lacking the democratic self-control required of nuclear powers. They present developing countries as seeking nuclear weapons for vanity or to gain attention and not for legitimate reasons of self-defense. And they believe that fanatics are more likely to control nuclear weapons in developing countries, especially Muslim countries, than in developed ones.

    The frame of nuclear orientalism takes it for granted that Muslim leaders could destroy the world in a fit of fanaticism. Here are some examples, deliberately chosen from both the left and the right. At the Livermore Lab, where I did my fieldwork, I was given a pamphlet that stated, “Smaller nations with deep-seated grievances against each other may lack the restraint that was exercised by the US and the USSR.” Here is Kenneth Adelman, who was an official in the Reagan Administration: “The real danger comes from some miserable Third World country which decides to use these weapons either out of desperation or incivility.”

    These comments take it as given that Third World countries are not like us. In that same spirit here is a very recent example from Forbes magazine: “Nuclear weapons are one of those sovereign rights that should not be granted to autocratic leaders. Because of this adherence to core values, global public opinion trusts Western democracies to have nuclear weapons and to use them in a defensive manner.” By contrast, the author of the Forbes article points out that “North Korea’s sovereignty inheres in just one man.” But remember Richard Nixon’s boast that he could exercise a similarly autocratic sovereignty.

    Many of these discussions assume that public opinion has a greater force in the West than in developing countries. For example, Bill Potter, a liberal arms control analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, has written, “Adverse domestic opinion may also serve as a constraint on the acquisition of nuclear weapons by some nations. Japan, West Germany, Sweden, and Canada are examples of democracies where public opposition could have a decided effect on nuclear weapons decisions. … The fear of adverse public opinion, on the other hand, might be expected to be marginal for many developing nations without a strong democratic tradition.”

    What I find fascinating about an expert on nuclear weapons and nuclear history writing this is that Britain, France, and the United States all made the decision to acquire nuclear weapons with absolutely no democratic debate. There was no debate in the public sphere, nor in those countries’ legislatures. These decisions were not subject to democratic decision making, yet even highly informed people continue to take it, falsely, as obvious that they were and are.

    And consider US media coverage of India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998. Michael Krepon, the liberal cofounder of the Stimson Center, said that India’s tests “weren’t done for security purposes,” despite the fact that India has a nuclear-armed China on its border. Instead, he said, India tested nuclear weapons “for reasons of domestic politics and national pride. … We have street demonstrations to protest nuclear weapons. They have them to celebrate them.” In other words, the US is serious, India is frivolous.

    More recently, the New York Times opined, using language usually reserved for children: “Maybe North Korea is just jealous of all the attention that Iran has been getting as a result of Tehran’s recent nuclear bad behavior and craves a spotlight of its own.” Nor is the New York Times alone in this view: “Whenever the North Koreans act up, one has to assume in part at least that they are trying to get the world’s attention.” That’s from Robert Einhorn, who was special advisor on nonproliferation and arms control to the secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Cartoons often make these assumptions even more visceral; many portray Kim Jong-un as a child who wants attention and can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.

    Today, our mental architecture is being destabilized because the US has a president who disturbingly resembles the most cartoonish versions of Kim Jong-un; Trump also seems like a child who wants attention and can’t be trusted. The dichotomy between a responsible, mature, rational, democratic United States and autocratic, impulsive, childish, irresponsible North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, or India is breaking down. Since President Trump won the election, students in my classes have begun to say things that they would not have said before. They are starting to ask, “He couldn’t just use the weapons on his own, right? There must be some way of constraining him?” I have to tell them that, in theory at least, he can use the weapons on his own.

    Students who used to reject out of hand my arguments about nuclear orientalism are now giving them a second look in the era of Trump, who made comments like this one in a speech to the United Nations: “The United States has great strength and patience but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself.” This is an open boast from the president of the United States that he is considering committing genocide.

    If we want to move toward a better, safer world, we have to start to realize that Americans have no monopoly on maturity and rationality. We should look in the mirror of Donald Trump and ask ourselves what it says about the United States that it was capable of electing such a human being as president. We should question our own smugness about how safe nuclear weapons are in our leader’s hands. Given that any country can end up with an irrational, autocratic leader at some point, the only world safe from nuclear war is a world where nuclear weapons have been abolished.

  • International Law and First Use of Nuclear Weapons

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    John BurroughsInternational law is part of the law of the land in the United States under the Constitution and decisions of the Supreme Court. The Department of Defense acknowledges that military operations must comply with the international law of armed conflict. The question of how international law applies to first use of nuclear weapons is therefore highly pertinent.

    The use of force of any kind is permitted under the United Nations Charter—a treaty to which the United States is a party—in only two circumstances: when directed or authorized by the UN Security Council or in the exercise of individual or collective self-defense in response to an armed attack. It is worth stressing that Security Council resolutions regarding the North Korean situation contain no hint of an authorization of use of force. On the contrary, they emphasize the primacy of diplomacy backed by sanctions.

    Since the George W. Bush administration, the United States has also had a doctrine permitting preemptive attacks in self-defense against serious threats, particularly threats related to weapons of mass destruction. This is essentially a doctrine permitting preventive war, although its proponents tend to avoid that term. Under Article 51 of the UN Charter and international law, the extent to which preemptive attacks are permitted is controversial. At the most, globally the majority opinion is that they are legal when in response to the early stages of an armed attack by the enemy. Anything beyond that is in my view an illegal preventive war.

    Is the first use of nuclear weapons legal under international law? I begin my analysis with broad requirements of necessity and proportionality, applying particularly to the initiation of war but also throughout its conduct. Those requirements are inherent in a rational and lawful approach to war, an approach that seeks to avoid conflict and, when it occurs, to limit its extent and to make possible the restoration of peace.

    The requirement of necessity in a sense speaks for itself. Military action must involve the application of the least amount of force required for purposes of self-defense. If a less destructive option is available for responding to an attack, it must be chosen. This has obvious implications for the choice between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons.

    Under the requirement of proportionality, the force employed in responding to an attack must not be excessive in relation to the scale of that attack. It must also be rationally related to the purposes of self-defense. When it comes to nuclear weapons, it is especially important that the risk of escalation is part of the proportionality calculus, as the International Court of Justice held in its 1996 Advisory Opinion. The implications are clear for first use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed enemy.

    Next, consider legal requirements applicable to particular military operations. A 2013 Report on Nuclear Employment Strategy submitted to Congress by the secretary of defense stated: “The new guidance makes clear that all plans must also be consistent with the fundamental principles of the Law of Armed Conflict. Accordingly, plans will, for example, apply the principles of distinction and proportionality and seek to minimize collateral damage to civilian populations and civilian objects. The United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects.”

    It is certainly to the good that the United States accepts that under the principle of distinction, civilians and civilian infrastructure may not be attacked. But what is missing is an acceptance of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks. The essentials of that prohibition are well stated in a 2007 Joint Chiefs of Staff publication: “Attackers are required to only use those means and methods of attack that are discriminate in effect and can be controlled.” (my emphasis).

    The omission of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks in the above-cited 2013 guidance probably reflects the fact that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for nuclear weapons to be used in a way that is “discriminate in effect” and “controlled.” That consideration played a key role in the International Court of Justice’s 1996 Advisory Opinion, which stated that under the fundamental principle of distinction, states must “never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets.” The Court found that “in view of the unique characteristics of nuclear weapons,” their use “seems scarcely reconcilable with respect” for that requirement.

    In addition to distinction, the 2013 Defense Department guidance also accepts the requirement of proportionality. This should be understood as the requirement of proportionality in attack, as distinguished from the general requirement of proportionality in the exercise of self-defense I discussed earlier. The requirement of proportionality in attack essentially requires that the collateral injury and damage caused by an attack not be disproportionate to the expected military advantage.

    Because it involves a balancing of costs and benefits, the requirement of proportionality in attack as such may not be understood to rule out all possible uses of nuclear weapons. Imagine a situation in which an enemy is believed to be on the verge of launching nuclear forces and it is believed that only a preemptive nuclear attack can prevent or limit such a launch.

    This scenario first of all demonstrates why nuclear-armed states must avoid going to war. From a legal standpoint, it remains the case that even if a proportionality calculus is believed to justify use of nuclear weapons, it is unlawful under the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks.

    Let me mention other rules significant in this context. They are included in the preamble to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted at a UN Conference in July 2017. The preamble states that the parties base themselves on “rules of international humanitarian law,” which is at the core of the law of armed conflict. In addition to the ones I have discussed, these include the rules on “precautions in attack, the prohibition on the use of weapons of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering, and the rules for the protection of the natural environment.” The preamble also reaffirms that “any use of nuclear weapons would also be abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.” Those are factors with legal value in international law. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which is very good at advocacy, has emphasized “principles of humanity” in explaining the prohibition of use.

    The nuclear-weapons-prohibition treaty will enter into legal force when 50 states have ratified it, probably in the next year or two. It will gain increasing authority as a statement of international law binding all states, including nonparties, as its number of parties grows over the years.

    In conclusion, the first use of nuclear weapons is at least generally contrary to international law. I say “at least generally” to acknowledge that skeptics love to trot out marginal scenarios where use arguably could be justified, as against a rogue nuclear-armed submarine. First use is also irrational—regardless of the particularities of a given situation—because it would open the door to further uses in other situations and promote proliferation.

    The rules I have discussed here also apply to second use of nuclear weapons. It is sometimes asserted that second use would be justified under the doctrine of reprisals. But what that doctrine permits is more restrictive than is generally understood.

    The most far-reaching conclusion, which I endorse, is that use of nuclear weapons should never be contemplated in a conflict situation. A more conservative conclusion, in line with existing US doctrine, is that there should be an extremely high threshold for even considering use of nuclear weapons, including with respect to the option of second use. Further, in determining such matters as targets and lethality requirements, minimization of civilian casualties should be an overriding factor, for example by selecting targets in nonurban areas in any second use scenario.

    What are the implications for presidential first use? I support the approach of requiring congressional approval, both for engaging in war generally and for first use of nuclear weapons. I suggest that the requirement of complying with international law be written into the legislation.

    In an ongoing conflict, where there may be pressures for quick decisions, as in a preemption situation, involvement of the entire Congress may be viewed as impractical. So additional approaches should be considered: for example, a body including the president, some officials, and some members of Congress that would make decisions when speed is deemed necessary. Provision should be explicitly made for the involvement of lawyers charged with upholding compliance with international law.

  • Protocol for a U.S. Nuclear Strike

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    The current US protocol for deciding whether to launch a nuclear strike—developed in the early 1960s, with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles—has two main functions and virtues: first, it concentrates the power and authority over the use of nuclear weapons in the presidency, at the highest level of the executive branch of the US government, thus keeping it out of the hands of the military and others. Second, it enables the president to respond rapidly and decisively to a nuclear attack by an enemy whose missiles may fly from one side of the planet to the other in 30 minutes; or whose missiles launched from submarines in the oceans may fly to targets in the United States in 15 minutes. It’s critical to have a protocol that allows the president to consider the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, to order their use, and to have the process of implementation begin in a very, very short period of time.

    The protocol’s virtues also produce its disadvantages. By virtue of the speed and concentration of authority in this protocol, the president has an opportunity to effectively railroad the nuclear commanders and forces into executing even a very large nuclear strike first—preemptively or preventively. That could lead to a misguided decision based on an impulsive psychology or on other factors that lead to a very bad call.

    The other downside to this protocol, which we used to talk about a lot more than we do today, is that the protocol itself, rooted as it is in speed and concentrated authority, can railroad the president into authorizing, in a hasty way, the use of nuclear weapons based on indications, possibly false, of an attack underway (a strategy known as “launch on warning”). In other words, we might believe we are retaliating when in fact we’re launching first.

    During the Cold War, to my knowledge, a false alarm never led to notification of the president at the beginning of the protocol that I’m about to describe. The false alarms were caught before that happened. Ironically, today, with the proliferation of ballistic missiles over the last decade (there’s been a huge surge in ballistic missile proliferation, and in their testing) you find that recent missile launches—from China, from Iran, from North Korea—have led on multiple occasions to sufficient ambiguity that the presidents have actually been notified about the ongoing event.

    Here are the key features of the current protocol. It begins with an early-warning function: the effort to detect a possible attack against North America and to notify the president and others to begin a process of deliberation. Every single day, the early-warning staffs out in Colorado and Omaha pick up events that require a second look to determine whether we’re under attack. Events they might review include a Japanese satellite launch into space, a North Korean missile test, a US missile test out of California, a wildfire in the southwest US. Most of these are usually dismissed quickly. Once or twice a month, something happens that requires a really close second look. And once in a blue moon, something happens and all hell breaks loose, as in the case of a false alarm concerning a missile launch.

    If these staffs receive any indication that we may be under attack, they have three minutes from the time the first sensor data arrives until they have to provide a preliminary assessment as to whether North America is under attack. If the assessment is of medium or high confidence that there is a threat, they initiate a process that will bring the president and his top advisors into an emergency conference no matter what time of day or night.

    Imagine that the president has decided to initiate a conference with his top advisors to consider the first use of nuclear weapons. The United States does not have a no-first-use policy. Furthermore, under the current review of our nuclear policy, undertaken primarily by the Pentagon, there is an emerging thesis that we should move further away from no first use and consider use of nuclear weapons in a wider variety of contingencies. We are on the verge of modifying our assurance to non-nuclear-weapons countries that we would not use nuclear weapons against them, in contradiction to the position adopted by the Obama administration.

    The emergency meeting of the president and his top advisors will typically include statutory members of the National Security Council: the secretary of defense; the secretary of state; the national security advisor; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who participates at the discretion and the invitation of the secretary of defense; and a number of key military command centers and personnel, the most important of whom is the commander of strategic forces based in Omaha, Nebraska, who commands all our strategic nuclear weapons.

    Time and circumstances permitting, the commander will brief the president on his nuclear options and their consequences. It will not be a long briefing. He’s going to have to boil this down into very, very brief sound-bites for the president: here are your options and here are the consequences. The commander will then ask the president a couple questions, such as whether he wants to withhold attacks on a particular location, such as a populous city. That briefing, if we are under attack, will be as short as 30 seconds. Of course, if the president is considering the first use of nuclear weapons, the timeline is not nearly as short and that conversation can last for quite a long period.

    If we are under attack, the president is going to have to consider his options in about six minutes, given how this protocol tends to work. If we’re not under attack, he can deliberate longer. Then he makes a decision: What option am I going to pursue? Am I going to decide to attack North Korea, for example? (With the current preprogrammed attack plan, I estimate we would have 80 nuclear aim points in North Korea.)

    Let’s say the president chooses an option. It will be conveyed instantly to the war room at the Pentagon, which probably initiated the presidential conference in the first place. The people in the Pentagon war room are listening in on the conversation and are beginning, as they hear the president moving toward a decision to use nuclear weapons, to prepare a launch order.

    Note that the secretary of defense does not confirm the president’s decision, nor does he or she have a right to veto it, nor does anyone else have the authority to override the decision. This is what Elaine Scarry has identified as, in effect, a “thermonuclear monarchy,” which gives the US president almost carte blanche command over the nuclear forces.

    When the president conveys his decision to the war room, they ask him to authenticate his identity using a special code. It’s referred to colloquially as “the biscuit,” otherwise known more officially as the “gold code.” If that code matches, the war room at the Pentagon, or an alternate, will format a launch order that will be transmitted down the chain of command to the executing commanders of the submarines, land-based rockets, and bombers.

    That launch order is roughly half the length of a tweet. It contains all the information necessary for the crews down the chain of command to launch their forces: the time to fire, the chosen war plan, an unlock code that the crews need to physically unlock their weapons prior to the launch, and special authentication codes that the crews check with the codes in their safes to satisfy themselves that these orders came from the president (those codes are not in the possession of the president, but of the military).

    That takes two minutes: 10 seconds to authenticate, then a minute or two to format and transmit the order. And in two more minutes, from the receipt of that order down the chain of command, missiles could be leaving their silos; it takes only about one minute for a Minuteman crew in the plains states of the Midwest to carry out their launch checklist. This was my job in the 1970s and at the time, it took me one minute. We delayed a little bit, for classified reasons, but that’s how long it took then and that’s how long it takes today.

    After the crews enter the war plan it goes out to all the missiles, which are preprogrammed with what wartime targets to strike. In peacetime, they are aimed at the ocean, but changing their targets to Moscow or any other targets is as easy as changing the channel on your TV set.

    Today, within a minute or two there can be up to 400 high-yield strategic weapons launched out of their silos to their targets, wherever those targets may be. Submarines take about 10 minutes longer because it takes them longer to target their missiles, position the submarine, and get to the proper depth. But even submarines on alert in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans would within 15 minutes be launching missiles out of their tubes, then firing them one at a time every 15 seconds.

    Lastly, the bombers would take 8 to 10 hours to reach their launch points if they were already on alert. They are not normally, today, in peacetime, on alert. They don’t even have bombs on board, so in a crisis they would have to be placed on full alert, with bombs and cruise missiles loaded, before they were usable.

    To sum up: the president wakes up, gives an order through a system so streamlined that there’s almost no gatekeeping, and, within five minutes, 400 bombs leave on missiles launched out of the Midwest. About 10 minutes later, another 400 leave on missiles launched out of submarines. That’s 800 nuclear weapons—roughly the equivalent of, in round numbers, 15,000 Hiroshima bombs.

    Reform of current US launch protocol is long overdue. Layering on new safeguards that strengthen checks and balances on presidential launch authority is necessary to reduce the risk of nuclear first use. Safeguards include the Markey-Lieu Bill, which would prohibit the president from employing nuclear weapons first unless Congress has declared war and provided specific authorization for their use; the Betts/Waxman solution, which would add the secretary of defense and attorney general to the chain of command to certify that a presidential launch order is authentic and legal; and adoption of a no-first-use policy, which would draw a red line that, if crossed, makes the president accountable and even impeachable.

    Regarding a second strike, the United States should eliminate launch on warning and move toward a true retaliatory posture, requiring protection of the president and his successors and providing a large increase in warning and decision time.

  • Presidential First Use vs. Congress

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    What are the constitutional limits on the president, if any, when it comes to using nuclear weapons? What kind of decision making comes into play when we think of the unthinkable: nuclear war? I say “unthinkable” because for over 70 years the idea around nuclear deterrence has been that we have these terribly destructive nuclear weapons in order to make sure that we do not use them. They used to call this MAD—“mutually assured destruction”—and it is mad. It is totally insane. But this idea remains the international framework for restraint.

    The nuclear disarmament treaties of the last decades have been bilateral and multilateral. Such treaties have significantly decreased the number of weapons in the US and Russian arsenals; eliminated nuclear aboveground testing and nearly all belowground testing; prevented nearly all countries from acquiring or developing nuclear weapons; and restrained those nations that have nuclear weapons from acquiring new ones. These were no small accomplishments. Congress has enshrined most of these into US law, either by ratifying treaties or by authorizing and funding nonproliferation programs. I firmly believe that Congress would not have acted in these ways without a very engaged citizenry.

    And now here we are today. Speaking for myself, I don’t believe that I’ve ever been so worried about a possible nuclear confrontation in my life. Nuclear weapon use can be triggered very quickly and then can escalate so rapidly that before we know it we’re in a nuclear war. The national command authority is very simple. The president makes the decision to use nuclear weapons and the secretary of defense executes the order. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you right now, I don’t know what will. Once the decision is made and in the process of being carried out, our systems of checks and balances don’t apply. Congress couldn’t stop it. The Supreme Court couldn’t stop it. The way it’s set up, not even the secretary of defense in theory has the authority to stop it.

    This is far from what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they drafted and adopted the document as the foundation of all our laws and democratic institutions. The framers gave the power to declare war to Congress. That is why H.R. 669 and S. 200, the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, was introduced by Congressman Ted Lieu of California and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, in January 2017. This bill prohibits any and every president from using US armed forces to carry out a first-use nuclear strike unless Congress has declared war and authorized such a first strike. I’m proud to be the very first cosponsor of the House bill, H.R. 669, which currently has 77 cosponsors: not a bad beginning.

    Requiring that Congress authorize a nuclear first strike shouldn’t be a Democrat or Republican issue. This is a commonsense issue. The bill clearly defines a first strike as meaning that the enemy has not launched a nuclear weapon against the United States or an ally of the United States. If another country launches a nuclear weapon at us, the President does have the right to proportionate self-defense under international law.

    Some might argue that prohibiting the United States from striking first with a nuclear weapon ties the president’s hands and makes the country vulnerable to attack. However, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, a true champion of rational nuclear disarmament, has noted that in any imaginable scenario, the US military could rely on our conventional arsenal alone to deliver a first strike of devastating force. That conventional arsenal includes our B-2 bombers, our cruise missiles, our Tomahawks, our nonnuclear ICBMs, and a huge range of weaponry. We’ve seen the destructive capacity of those conventional first-strike weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Limiting a first strike involving nuclear force does not leave us weak or vulnerable.

    Democrats were strongly pushing President Obama to adopt a no-first-strike policy when he was in office. This is not just about President Trump. We have been contemplating this policy for quite some time. But it will take many more cosponsors for this bill to have any chance of moving in the House or the Senate. It will take the Republican leadership of Congress being a lot more nervous about the possibility of the president actually launching a nuclear strike. Meanwhile we have the President backing away from hard-won international agreements to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians. We have him exchanging ever more heated taunts with nuclear-armed North Korea. This is why the Markey-Lieu bill is so absolutely necessary.

    Congress needs to assert its Constitutional authority when it comes to war, and especially when it comes to the catastrophic possibility of nuclear war. I’m proud to have also joined with Senator Markey and Representative Conyers to introduce bipartisan, bicameral legislation to reaffirm Congress’s constitutional power over first strike on North Korea. H.R. 4140, the No Unconstitutional Strike against North Korea Act, was introduced last October with 60 co-sponsors. Two of them are Republicans. The bill restricts any funds from being used to launch a military strike against North Korea without prior approval from Congress. That’s any strike, not just a nuclear strike. Because war is war is war is war, and only Congress has the right to declare and authorize it.

    I worry that President Trump actually believes that we have some kind of missile defense system able to knock all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons out of the sky if they were to launch a nuclear weapon. No such thing exists. We cannot guarantee the protection of ourselves and our allies.

    These current crises, threatening and as frightening as they are, speak to the underlying and long-unresolved crisis of nuclear weapons themselves. President Obama began a program of so-called nuclear modernization, which would update, not just maintain, the current US nuclear arsenal, and replace older nuclear weapons with modern versions. President Trump has doubled down on that proposal to modernize and update our current nuclear weapons, and is proposing to create new nuclear weapons.

    The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with a report that estimated the cost of President Trump’s plans to maintain and replace the US nuclear arsenal over 30 years at $1.24 trillion. That is $200 billion more than the last estimate. When you factor in inflation the price tag soars to $1.7 trillion. These costs are simply unsustainable. They threaten the entire federal budget, including the rest of the military budget.

    The CBO report also laid out several different options for improving our military force structure that are much more cost-effective. This is important, because the Pentagon sometimes likes to paint its proposals in very stark terms: either give us everything we ask for or we’re all gonna die. That’s a false choice, as the CBO report makes abundantly clear.

    However, I fervently believe that the best choice the United States can make, and that the world can make, is to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. I realize that this can’t be done in a day. I’m not a fool. But my fear right now is that there has been a shift in thinking among the nuclear powers—not just the United States and Russia but also France, the UK, and China, not to mention India, Pakistan, and North Korea—that nuclear arsenals must be protected, updated, and increased, all with an eye to the inevitable use of a nuclear strike against an enemy in the foreseeable future.

    While the nuclear powers are hunkering down, the rest of the world is moving toward a demand for total nuclear disarmament. Not too long ago that was at least a future goal of nuclear powers: careful, verifiable, incremental disarmament, while assuring that no other nation acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. I fear for the current moment. We have members of Congress who think using a nuke against North Korea or Iran is not just something we should think about; they believe it is something we should do.

    I think it’s time to get moving again. It’s time once again to remind our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers that these are issues that affect every single American family, every single one of us. In a very busy world, where families are focused on picking up their kids from school, wondering how the economy is going to affect their jobs and their grocery bills, there is one more sure thing that we all need to remember: a nuclear war will kill us all. Quickly or slowly, it will kill all of us. Nuclear war not only devastates the people where it falls. Over time, it would devastate the world as we know it. That was once a commonly understood fact, but it’s been forgotten because so many other crises and hardships have moved to the forefront.

    It is time to remind everyone, including every single member of Congress, what the reality is. It is time to rebuild this movement across ages, across regions, cities, towns, suburbs, and rural communities, across genders and races, because a nuclear war will devastate us all. It’s important to remember, though, how different the times are now than when the freeze movement was organized. We no longer have a Democratic Congress. We don’t even have a moderate Republican Congress. We have a very conservative Republican-controlled House and Senate that have never moved forward any legislation outside their own narrow agenda. And we have a very unstable, volatile, erratic White House.

    In 1978 I was a college intern in the office of Senator George McGovern (no relation but one of my heroes). I had the privilege of attending a debate that he had with William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale University. The debate was entitled “Resolved: That the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Are in the Interest of US National Security.” Senator McGovern concluded by referring to a 1963 debate on a limited nuclear test ban treaty. And here’s what he said that night at Yale:

    Senator Everett Dirksen took the floor to close the debate. He said that he had just reread John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the description of what happened to that great city, the morning after. The scene of one family sitting charred around the breakfast table; out in the yard, bits and pieces of children’s clothing; the broken arm of a doll; toys and debris scattered over the landscape. And he said, “I thought about that scene, and I said that someday Everett Dirksen will be buried in Illinois, and when that happens, I don’t want them to put on my gravestone, ‘He knew about this, and he didn’t care.’”

    We need to show that we care. We need to build this movement. Time is of the essence.