Trump critic Bob Corker to lead Senate hearing on president’s powers to order nuclear attack – By Michael Collins (usatoday.com) / Nov 14 2017
WASHINGTON — Just a month after he warned that President Trump may be setting the nation on the path to World War III, Sen. Bob Corker will preside Tuesday over a hearing that will examine the president’s authority to launch a nuclear strike.
The hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will mark the first time in more than four decades that the panel or its House counterpart has specifically reviewed the issue of the president’s powers to order a nuclear attack.
“This discussion is long overdue,” said Corker, the Tennessee Republican who called the hearing as chairman of the Senate committee.
The hearing comes as Trump continues to trade insults with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and amid concerns by some members of Congress about the executive branch’s authority to wage war, particularly with nuclear weapons.
“The committee is clearly looking for remedies to ensure that a demented president could not unilaterally start a nuclear conflagration,” said Bruce Blair, an expert on nuclear command and control and a research scholar at the Program of Science and Global Security at Princeton University.
As commander-in-chief, the president has the sole authority to order a nuclear strike. While existing procedures call for the president to consult first with military and civilian leaders, the final decision rests with him.
“No one can veto the president’s decision,” said Blair, co-founder of Global Zero, an international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Some members of Congress are pushing for a check on the president’s powers.
Bills filed in January by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., would prohibit the president from launching a preemptive nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress. Neither piece of legislation has gained any traction in the Republican-controlled Congress.
But Trump’s aggressive approach toward North Korea continues to raise fears that his rhetoric might backfire and further inflame tensions. Trump threatened in August to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” in response to reports that the communist regime had developed a warhead that could be mounted on a ballistic missile.
In an interview with The New York Times, Corker, Trump’s most outspoken Republican critic in Congress, accused Trump of undermining diplomacy efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and warned that the president’s actions could set the nation on the path to World War III.
Blair said the president’s authority to order a nuclear strike is ripe for review in Congress not only because of Trump’s confrontational stance toward North Korea, but also because of a surge in the number of ballistic missiles held by other countries and because nuclear protocols are so outdated that they are “dysfunctional for purposes of responding to an attack.”
With North Korea, China, India and Pakistan all mass producing ballistic missiles, it has become harder to gauge whether a missile launch is just a test or a legitimate threat to the United States and its allies, he said.
“We’re living in a grey zone that makes this protocol all the more important, not only from the standpoint of responding to an attack but also giving the president an opportunity to make a decision when the evidence is ambiguous,” he said.
Outdated technology also has made it difficult at times to set up a conference with the people who are supposed to advise the president on such decisions, Blair said.
At Tuesday’s hearing, senators will hear from C. Robert Kehler, a retired Air Force general who served as commander of the United States Strategic Command; Peter D. Feaver, a political science and public policy professor at Duke University; and Brian McKeon, former acting under secretary for policy at the Defense Department.
The hearing is one in a series the committee is holding on war making and foreign policy. Last month, the panel examined whether it’s time to update the resolution authorizing the president to order the use of military force in foreign countries.
Corker said afterward that he expects the committee to take up a new military-force authorization resolution “fairly soon.”
PB/TK – A POTUS has roughly 30 seconds to have consultation to launch any counterstrike and if a counterstrike is not needed but POTUS feels a launch is necessary that consultation can last as long as the POTUS wants. Yep you wanna make sure all the chickens are counted and that POTUS is of sound mind, too bad there are quite a few numbers of people who are quick to say “just nuke the bastards…. make the sand glow…” without understanding any repercussions
