How bad is 2017? Bad enough that a Senate hearing held to discuss Trump's ability to single-handedly start a nuclear war went by mostly unnoticed. The good news, and we are definitely in the mood for good news, is that witnesses were quick to assure the assembled lawmakers that the military won't be letting Trump launch nuclear strikes without good reason.
During Monday’s hearing, Gen. C. Robert Kehler, former commander of Strategic Command, emphasized that a presidential order to use a nuclear weapon must be legal. The basic legal principles of proportionality and necessity apply to the use of nuclear weapons, he said, and "if the order was considered to be illegal, the military is obligated to refuse to follow it."
“The U.S. military doesn’t blindly follow orders,” Kehler said in his opening remarks.
Among those senators alarmed by the idea that our nuclear arsenal is in the hands of a demonstrably ever-irritable lunatic is the committee's chair, Republican Sen. Bob Corker. Despite these reassurances, he apparently remains alarmed.
By the time Corker emerged from the hearing — the first to address the president’s nuclear authority in over four decades — he was at a loss for what to do next. “I do not see a legislative solution today,” Corker told reporters.
The reason he doesn't see a legislative solution is because in general, the witnesses were very insistent that if a president attempted to launch an illegal nuclear strike, he is surrounded by Not Fucking Insane people who would refuse to carry out the order—and that attempting to rein in this power by barring a nuclear first strike without prior approval by Congress would unfairly tie the hands of future presidents who might need to fire off the nukes because reasons.
“If we were to change the decision-making process because of a distrust of this president, that would be an unfortunate decision for the next president,” said Brian McKeon, who served as acting undersecretary for policy at the Defense Department during the Obama administration.
Whatever you might think of that logic, the rather more pressing current problem is that we are being assured that Donald Trump could not launch nuclear weapons in a fit of spontaneous rage because the people around him are smart enough to not carry out such orders.
Yeah, let’s maybe back the trolley up on that one a bit. It’s certainly a lovely, reassuring thing to believe, of course, but it seems to require dismissing the entire Donald Trump campaign and administration up to this point as being just a practice run. At no point, during the last year, has anyone in any position of authority in the Trump administration surprised us with a sudden burst of competence. Just where is this newfound sanity supposedly going to be coming from?
Right now his attorney general is considering appointing a special counsel to investigate anything and everything Trump's past election opponent did in the past fifteen years—weaponizing his Justice Department because Trump wishes it. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is a diplomatic irrelevancy. Chief of Staff John Kelly was, it was assumed, going to rein in Trump's rage-fests and his forays into rank xenophobia and racism. That didn't work out.
If we're presuming that Trump's handpicked defense secretary, a man known for the nickname "Mad Dog," will defy a presidential order to bomb take-your-pick because golly, it might be perceived as an international war crime, and in a fight between Donald Trump and his own not-fucking-insane underlings will back up his underlings and bravely tell Donald Trump to go stuff it, that's putting quite a bit of faith in a Trump team whose members have not once, not ever evinced such independent, patriotic, nation-saving thinking.
So no, Sen. Bob Corker is probably no more pleased than he was when the hearing began. The core problem, of course, is that most of the top people in Washington know full well that Trump is unfit for office and potentially devastatingly dangerous, but since none of them are going to do jack-shit about that we're now looking for how to patch the holes in the system so that even if Donald Trump did act out in one of his fits of irrational rage, the nation could still somehow survive anyway.