![]() The “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War was predicated on the idea that the leaders of both superpowers were rational enough to avoid a war that would end with the destruction of both nations. ![]() That unilateral launch authority is so powerful, so unchecked, and so scary that, years before Watergate, Nixon had turned it into its own geopolitical strategy, the so-called Madman Theory, with which he threatened the Soviets and the Vietnamese that he might actually be crazy enough to nuke Hanoi-or Moscow-if they didn’t accede to his demands. During the Cold War, there wasn’t a second to waste. Missiles would leave their silos just four minutes after the president’s verbal command. nuclear system is designed to respond to a commander in chief’s launch order instantaneously. Nixon himself had stoked official fears during a meeting with congressmen during which he reportedly said, “I can go in my office and pick up a telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead.” Senator Alan Cranston had phoned Schlesinger, warning about “the need for keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust.”Ĭranston’s concern is something that has nagged at nuclear war planners since the earliest days of the Cold War. Schlesinger feared that the president, who seemed depressed and was drinking heavily, might order Armageddon. Moreover, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger recalled years later that in the final days of the Nixon presidency he had issued an unprecedented set of orders: If the president gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them. Yet, on that August day, it had been quietly removed from Nixon’s hands-remaining behind at the White House with the incoming commander-in-chief, Gerald Ford. In a democratic country without hereditary power, royal crowns or bejeweled thrones, the nuclear football is in some ways the only physical manifestation of our nation’s head of state. ![]()
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