A day after an influential Senate committee mulled whether to change the president’s unilateral authority to launch a nuclear strike, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill to ban the U.S. from launching a nuclear first strike.
U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) on Wednesday introduced exceptionally short legislation that would prevent the United States from initiating a pre-emptive nuclear launch against a foe.
The bill has just one section, which reads: “Section 1. Policy on No-First-Use of Nuclear Weapons. It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first.”
“The United States should not use nuclear arms in a first strike,” Smith said in a prepared statement. “They are instruments of deterrence, and they should be treated as such. A declaratory policy of not using nuclear weapons first will increase strategic stability, particularly in a crisis, reducing the risk of miscalculation that could lead to an unintended all-out nuclear war.”
Near the end of his term, then-President Barack Obama reportedly considered changing U.S. policy that allows for nuclear first strikes, but never followed through. Reports in late 2016 indicated there was opposition to such a move from top members of Obama’s Cabinet and U.S. allies including Japan and the United Kingdom.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 gives the president of the United States sole authority to authorize a nuclear strike.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have expressed concerns about President Donald Trump’s power to alone order a nuclear launch, and legislation filed in both chambers earlier this year by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) would require congressional authorization for a nuclear first strike.
Markey was among the senators present Tuesday for a mostly civil Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the topic. Trump critic and panel Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) convened the hearing to discuss possible limitations on the president’s nuclear powers: something former U.S. officials who testified warned against.
Republican and Democratic senators mostly agreed that Trump should be empowered to deploy nuclear weapons if his military and intelligence advisers are convinced an unfriendly nation has launched, or might very soon launch, a nuclear strike against the United States.
For some Democratic senators, however, the elephant in the room was whether Congress should prohibit Trump and his successors from ordering a wartime first strike.
“We are concerned that the president is so unstable and volatile and has a decision-making process that is so quixotic that he might order a nuclear strike that is out of step with U.S. national security interests,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said about an hour into the proceedings.
Markey put it more colorfully: “The president’s bombastic words could turn into nuclear reality.”
Markey’s bill, or anything like it, was a bridge too far for the three ex-government witnesses at the Senate hearing, none of whom thought Congress should legislatively dilute the president’s existing authority. One witness, retired U.S. Strategic Command chief Gen. C. Robert Kehler, said existing safeguards are enough to prevent Trump or any other president from initiating an illegal, unilateral first strike.
Kehler said that if Trump “woke up the military” and called for a first strike, swarms of legal and military advisers would meet with the president to discuss the legality of the order. That, Kehler said, builds a cooling off period into any potential order to attack first.
The explanation did not satisfy Markey.
“We shouldn’t be trusting the generals to be a check on the president,” Markey said. “I don’t think we should be trusting a set of protocols. It should be the congressional prerogative to declare a nuclear war.”
Stockpile Modernization
Toward the end of the hearing, Corker went to bat for the ongoing 30-year, $1-trillion-plus nuclear deterrent modernization program the Obama administration started in 2016.
“Many of us have been to the facilities where [nuclear weapons] are modernized [and] it’s amazing that some of the guidance systems in [the weapons] are not much more sophisticated that the tubes on a black and white television,” Corker said at the conclusion of the two-hour session. “We need to continue to invest … in the proper technologies.”
Two of the three witnesses at the hearing agreed.
“People who are worried about nuclear war should be in favor of reasonable modernization,” said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Feaver was director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council in the Bill Clinton administration.
Brian McKeon, former acting undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon in the Obama administration, likewise said he favors “recapitalization for both the warheads and the triad.”
In a late October report, the Congressional Budget Office said it would cost $1.2 trillion over 30 years to maintain and update the U.S. nuclear deterrent. That would include $261 million at the Department of Energy.
