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Related: About this forumRadiolab on NPR nuclear war episode stating that trump can nuke at will:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/nukes/This episode, we profile one Air Force Major who asked that question back in the 1970s and learn how the very act of asking it was so dangerous it derailed his career. We also pick up the question ourselves and pose it to veterans both high and low on the nuclear chain of command. Their responses reveal once and for all whether there are any legal checks and balances between us and a phone call for Armageddon.
at 35:00 William Perry secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton states this is the case. Really scary and well done radio show.
I'm hoping they are making special rules for trump. But, it doesn't sound like that is possible.
Journeyman
(15,038 posts)Very few of my friends and family outside the military knew anything about the ramp up to confrontation.
What I learned was simple, and quite eye opening:
"In the nuclear age, the difference between the Home Front and the Front Line is simply a matter of perception: If you know we're at war, you are too."
Ultimately, all we have left is Viktor Frankl's Challenge:
"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."
longship
(40,416 posts)In the Marshall Islands, at Bikini Atoll. Richard Rhodes describes it in detail in his wonderful history Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. The Castle Bravo test ran away from the scientists who predicted its yield, mistakenly omitting a crucial lithium reaction in their calculation. As Rhodes describes it, Castle Bravo went off "like gangbusters". It was nearly triple the projected yield, 15 Mtons instead of about five. It endangered every witness in the observer locations, and radiated residents far removed from the blast including a Japanese fishing trawler, ironically named Lucky Dragon, Daigo Fukury Maru.
The deadly miscalculation of Castle Bravo: