“In the end, we must depend upon creatures of our own making.”
Goethe, Faust
It’s clear and straightforward: the United States must avoid nuclear war or all other national obligations will become moot. It follows that all available fiscal and intellectual resources should be vested in this obligation. [1] Prima facie, during the self-inflicted chaos of “Trump II,” [2] this is not an object of legal governance in which “DOGE” cuts could conceivably be rational.
In thinking about existential perils, metaphor could become a clarifying starting point. A nuclear war could closely resemble any other incurable disease. The only realistic therapeutic hopes would lie in prevention. Among other things, this would mean objective science-based [3] analyses; not narrowly partisan or revenge-centered calculations.
To progress with appropriately disciplined analyses, one key distinction should be declared at the outset. This distinction concerns core differences between a deliberate or intentional nuclear war and one that is unintentional or inadvertent. Should this primary dichotomy be ignored or overlooked for any reason, the United States would impair its capacity to identify meaningful policy options. Any such impairment could prove intolerable and irremediable.
There is more. There are variously related impediments and ironies. Because there has never been an authentic nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t “count”), calculating useful probabilities will be sorely problematic or literally impossible. In logic and mathematics, true probabilities must always be derived from the determinable frequency of relevant past events. When there are no such events—that is, when the examined situations are unprecedented or sui generis—nothing can be said with predictive reliability.
Good news can also be bad news. In matters regarding nuclear war, good news can display irony: we are fortunate to have avoided a nuclear conflict thus far, but this seemingly encouraging history also signals something ominous. As scholars and policy-makers, we cannot predict the likelihood of nuclear warfare.
Both scholars and policy makers must calculate law-based strategies to avert nuclear war and minimize any resulting harms of a nuclear war that could not be prevented. This challenging calculation will vary according to presumed enemy intentions and presumed plausibility of accident — hacking intrusion or decisional-miscalculation. Taken together as cumulative categories of existential threat, the risks of an unintentional nuclear war could best be described as “inadvertent.”
On such time-urgent matters, language matters. While any instance of accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent, not every case of an inadvertent nuclear war would be accidental. Whatever the nuances, all examples would represent complex elements of a US national security problem — in essence, preventing a “final epidemic.” [4]
American security planners should never approach nuclear war prevention and mitigation as a tactical issue, which is a misguided approach that continues to characterize nuclear firebreak thinking in Moscow. [5] Moreover, as the Trump presidency moves closer to openly favoring Russian aggression over Ukrainian self-defense, it is no longer inconceivable that American military forces might be commanded by US President Trump to act against America’s NATO allies. Faced with such once-unimaginable scenarios, any critical nuclear firebreaks would emerge between NATO and Russia; not between Russia and the United States. [6]
Credo quia absurdum, said ancient Roman philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” There is more. Nuclear war avoidance can only be understood in light of credible, or at least conceivable, intersections between identifiable threats. All such intersections would be more-or-less likely — a conclusion based on best possible approximations of formal logic, not on actual history. These threats could sometimes be “synergistic.” Accordingly, intellectually-focused attention on reasonably-anticipated synergies should immediately become one of America’s primary national security obligations.
In dealing with growing nuclear war risks involving North Korea or China, no concept could be more important than synergy. By definition, these interactions are those wherein the intersectional “whole” of any nuclear war risk effects must be greater than the sum of its component “parts.” Unless such interactions are correctly evaluated at the beginning of any crisis, the United States could underestimate the total impact of any potential nuclear engagement. Today, under Trump’s second term, it would not be hard to imagine such an underestimation. Significantly, the tangible flesh and blood consequences of such underestimations could defy both analytic imaginations and post-war justifications. [7]
This writer (Professor Louis René Beres) has been publishing about complex nuclear issues for over fifty years. After four years of doctoral study at Princeton in the late 1960s, long an intellectual center of American nuclear strategic thought (recall especially Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer), I began to consider adding a modest personal contribution to a then-evolving nuclear literature. By the late 1970s, I was cautiously preparing a new manuscript on US nuclear strategy. At that early stage of a still-emerging discipline, I was most interested in US presidential authority to order the use of American nuclear weapons.
From the start, I learned that allegedly reliable safeguards had been incorporated into all operational nuclear command/control decisions, but that these same safeguards would not be applied at the presidential level. To a young scholar searching hopefully for nuclear war-avoidance opportunities, this ironic disjunction didn’t make any obvious sense. So, what next?
It was time for gathering suitable clarifications. I reached out to retired General Maxwell D. Taylor, a former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. In reassuringly rapid response to my query, General Taylor sent a comprehensive handwritten reply. Dated March 14, 1976, the distinguished General’s detailed letter (attached hereto) concluded prophetically: “As to those dangers arising from an irrational American president, the only protection is not to elect one.”
Until recently, I had never given much thought to this authoritative response. Today, however, during the second presidency of Donald J. Trump, General Taylor’s 1976 warning takes on substantially more time-urgent meanings. Based on ascertainable facts and logical derivations (called “entailments” in philosophy of science terminology) rather than wishful thinking (Sigmund Freud would have referenced “wish fulfillment” as relevant motive [8]), we ought now to assume that if an American president were to exhibit accessible signs of emotional instability, irrationality or delusional behavior, he could still order the use of US nuclear weapons. He could do so officially, legally, and without expectations of any nuclear chain-of-command “disobedience.” Further, a US president could become emotionally unstable, irrational or delusional, but still not exhibit such grave liabilities conspicuously. [9] What then? [10]
A corollary question should also be brought to mind: What stance should be assumed by the National Command Authority (such as the Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several others) if it should ever decide to oppose an “inappropriate” presidential order to launch American nuclear weapons? Could the National Command Authority (NCA) “save the day” by acting in an impromptu or creatively ad hoc fashion? Or should indispensable preparatory steps have already been taken? Should there be in place certain credible and effective legal measures to assess the ordering president’s reason and judgment, and countermand the inappropriate or otherwise wrongful order?
The US Constitution’s Declare War Clause aside, [11] any presidential order to use nuclear weapons, even if issued by an apparently irrational or incapacitated president, would have to be obeyed. Failure to comply in such dire circumstances could be illegal. Any chain-of-command disobedience—even where required by the laws of war and derivative Nuremberg obligations—would be impermissible. [12] As a practical matter, critical members of President Donald J. Trump’s chain of command “team” seem willing to oblige their commander-in-chief at all costs, perhaps without any hesitation.
There is more. Theoretically, a US President could order the first use of American nuclear weapons even if this country were not under a nuclear attack. In this connection, further strategic and legal [13] distinctions would need to be made between a nuclear “first use” and a nuclear “first strike.” Operationally and jurisprudentially, these would not be minor distinctions.
While there exists a substantive difference between these options, it is a distinction that President Donald Trump continuously fails to understand or accept. Where should the American polity and government go from here in tackling such stubborn existential issues? In response, an informed and comprehensive answer will be needed to the following question: if faced with a presidential order to use nuclear weapons, and without sufficiently appropriate corroborative evidence of an impending existential threat, would the National Command Authority be willing to disobey, and would it be capable of enforcing such vital expressions of disobedience?
Such an unprecedented circumstance would require authoritative decisions to be made in a matter of minutes. Looking to past policies offers little guidance on how to handle such a crisis because all scientific judgments of probability must be based upon relevant past events. For this reason, there is currently no scientifically valid way to assess the probabilities of possible outcomes.
Regarding North Korea — setting aside Iran because the country is not yet nuclear [14]— the US president should take special care to avoid seat-of-the-pants analogies between commercial bargaining and military brinksmanship. Geopolitics is not the same as hotel branding or casino gambling. Faced with force-multiplying uncertainties concerning Kim Jong Un’s willingness to push the escalatory envelope, the American president could suddenly and unexpectedly find himself faced with a grievously stark choice between outright capitulation and nuclear war. [15] Even for a more intellectually gifted US president than the incumbent, such choice could prove overwhelming or paralyzing. [16]
To avoid being placed in such a limited-choice strategic environment, an American president should understand that having a larger national nuclear force or “button” might not bestow irresistible bargaining advantages. On the contrary, it could generate unwarranted US leadership overconfidence and derivative forms of decision-miscalculation. In such wholly unfamiliar and many-sided matters, size would matter, but plausibly not in the way that Donald Trump had intended during his first presidency. In some realistic scenarios, it could vary inversely with American power.
Searching for “escalation dominance” during upcoming military crises, US President Donald Trump must navigate nimbly in the swelling seas of competitive risk-taking. In the absence of policies that are simultaneously prudent and competitive, even an inadvertent decisional outcome could sometime spark either a “symmetrical” or “asymmetrical” a nuclear war. Whether caused by accident, hacking, or simple miscalculation, [17] there would be no meaningful winner, not even for the side with the “bigger button.”
In the aftermath of an unintended nuclear conflict, an American president who had earlier downplayed “preparation” in strategic negotiations—during “Trump I,” this president proudly subordinated “preparation” to “attitude” —could reconsider his antecedent national security postures. [18] By then, of course, it would be too late. As survivors of a once-preventable nuclear conflagration, this president and his predictably servile national security appointees might “envy the dead.” [19] Such paradoxical envy could surface whether the unprecedented nuclear conflict had been intentional or unintentional, and whether it had been occasioned by base motives, miscalculation, computer error, hacking intrusion or weapon-system/infrastructure accident.
The conclusions of all this are simultaneously portentous and incontestable. There is no greater threat to the United States and the wider world than a nuclear war. [20] If allowed to materialize further, this unique threat would come to resemble any other incurable disease. Ipso facto, the only “therapeutic” hopes for Americans and others should lie in prevention.
Today, the United States is “ground-zero” for planetary survival challenges. This is not a cliché or empty witticism. Beginning with selection of a more intellectually capable, coherent and law-oriented US president, Americans and most others will ultimately have to rely on nuclear security arrangements fashioned by the United States.
In Washington, this will mean looking not only at external military threats from multiple state and sub-state adversaries, but also at possible safeguards to protect against irrational US presidential decision-making. Per former Joint Chiefs Chairman General Maxwell Taylor’s personal letter dated March 14, 1976 (handwritten/attached hereto), “…the best protection [against an irrational president] is [still] not to elect one.” Having already failed to implement this protection, America and the wider world will now have to solve a unique historical conundrum: how shall we legally manage existential nuclear war threats at international (geopolitical) and intra-national (US political) levels at the same time?
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with military nuclear strategy. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003). In recent years, he has published on nuclear warfare issues in the Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The Atlantic; Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); BESA (Israel); The New York Times; The Jerusalem Post; International Security (Harvard); World Politics (Princeton); The War Room (US Army War College); Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); Modern Diplomacy; Small Wars Journal); Modern War Institute (West Point); and Oxford University Press. His twelfth book, published in 2016 (2nd ed., 2018) by Rowman & Littlefield, is titled: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442253254/Surviving-Amid-Chaos-Israel’s-Nuclear Strategy. A monograph on this subject was published by Beres with a postscript by U.S. General (USA/ret.) Barry R. McCaffrey at Tel Aviv University in December 2016: https://sectech.tau.ac.il/sites/sectech.tau.ac.il/files/PalmBeachBook.pdf Some of Professor Beres’ earlier writings on US nuclear war decision-making were co-authored with US General John T. Chain (USAF/ret.) and US Admiral Leon “Bud” Edney (USN/ret). General Chain was CINCSAC, Commander-in-Chief, US Strategic Air Command. Admiral Edney served as SACLANT, Supreme NATO Allied Commander, Atlantic.
Professor Louis René Beres was born in Zürich at the end of World War II, At Princeton, he studied German literature and German philosophy (note Faust epigraph, above) along with nuclear strategy and jurisprudence.
NOTES
[1] Says Guillaume Apollinaire: “It must not be forgotten that it is perhaps more dangerous for a nation to allow itself to be conquered intellectually than by arms.” See: The New Spirit and the Poets, 1917.
[2] See Karl Jaspers, Reason and anti-Reason in our Time (1952). The German philosopher clarifies the “fog of the irrational” that bedeviled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. In a timeless distillation of his grand thought, Jaspers proclaimed prophetically: “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no logical argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition….” Today, Americans witness the presidential result of a similarly deluded “mass of believers.”
[3] “Science,” says philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958) “by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual, is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation…The latter is not possible without the former.” This does not mean, however, a need to account for every conceivably pertinent explanatory factor. Clarification can be extrapolated from “Occam’s Razor.” This “principle of parsimony” stipulates an analytic preference for the simplest explanation that is aptly consistent with scientific method. Regarding US nuclear war concerns, it urges, inter alia, that the president’s military planners not seek to identify and examine every seemingly important variable, but instead to say the most, with the least. Too often, this presents a neglected imperative. Strategists and planners mistakenly attempt to be too inclusive in fashioning their processes of explanation, thus needlessly distancing themselves from more “parsimonious” theory.
[4] This term was used as title of an important early book dealing with nuclear war dangers: Ruth Abrams and Susan Cullen, The Final Epidemic: Physicians and Scientists on Nuclear War (1981). The well-respected contributors to this sobering anthology were associated with two prominent scientific/medical organizations of the time: Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians Against Nuclear War. The present writer, Louis Rene Beres, was an active member of these groups at both Princeton and Purdue. For authoritative early accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[5] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Modern Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/11/27/nuclear-escalation-doctrine-impact-of-american-and-russian-firebreaks-on-israels-security/
[6] There are other worrisome examples in which President Trump’s declared foreign policies heighten the chances of a nuclear war. These include his law-violating stance on demanding Ukrainian concessions to the Russian aggressor; his incoherent statements that “We need Greenland” and ‘We need the Panama Canal;” his strategically-senseless demands that the Gulf of Mexico be re-named the “Gulf of America;” and (most preposterous of all, prima facie) his escalating references to Canada as “America’s 51st state.” Taken together, these unprecedented postures of an American president bring to mind the prophetic statement of playwright Berthold Brecht: “The one who laughs has simply not yet heard the terrible news.”
[7] See earlier, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School: https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/02/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/
[8] More specific to the present subject, Freud observed in a lesser-known work on Woodrow Wilson: “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.”
[9] This caveat does not apply to current US President Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly displayed serious emotional, ethical and intellectual liabilities.
[10] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/#post-heading
[11] As a practical matter, Constitutional provisions of war declaration have been immaterial since the Vietnam War.
[12] Nonetheless, international law is a part of United States law, and the authoritative Nuremberg Judgments clarify that chain-of-command disobedience can be indispensably law-enforcing. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.
[13] As corollary, under international law, the formal question of whether or not a “state of war” actually exists between states is generally ambiguous. Traditionally, it was held that a declaration of war was necessary before any true state of war could be said to exist. Hugo Grotius divided wars into declared wars, which were legal, and undeclared wars, which were not. (See Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, Bk. III, Chapters. III, IV, and XI.) By the start of the twentieth century, the position that war obtains only after a conclusive declaration of war by one of the parties was codified by Hague Convention III. This treaty stipulated that hostilities must never commence without a “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. (See Hague Convention III Relative to the Opening of Hostilities, 1907, 3 NRGT, 3 series, 437, article 1.) Currently, declarations of war may be tantamount to admissions of international criminality, because of the express criminalization of aggression by authoritative international law, and it could therefore represent a clear jurisprudential absurdity to tie any true state of war to formal and prior declarations of belligerency. It follows that a state of war may now exist without any formal declarations, but only if there exists an actual armed conflict between two or more states, and/or at least one of these affected states considers itself “at war.”
[14] In the case of Iran, US President Trump has openly threatened Iran with unprecedented harms (aerial bombardments) if it does not make immediate nuclear concessions at the bargaining table. Though Iran is still pre-nuclear, its unwillingness to surrender to Trump ultimatums could spawn (suddenly or incrementally) massive conventional warfare engagements and an “asymmetrical nuclear war.” Here, a relentless bilateral search for “escalation dominance” would prod Trump to cross the nuclear threshold. Technically, this scenario would represent a form of “limited nuclear war,” and could quickly involve Israel. See by this author, Louis René Beres, at BESA (Israel): https://besacenter.org/limited-nuclear-war-and-israels-national-strategy/
[15] This again raises the concept of “escalation dominance.” See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at The War Room, US Army War College, Pentagon: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making-and-nuclear-war-an-urgent-american-problem/
[16] In a generally neglected North Korean nuclear war scenario, military forces of the “hermit kingdom” would operate directly against Israel on behalf of Iran. This type of Middle Eastern involvement would not be without historical precedent. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, North Korean air forces operated against Israel (IAF) on behalf of Syria.
[17] See Clausewitz oft-cited comment in On War: “Everything is very simple in war, but even the simplest thing is very difficult.”
[18] In principle, at least, preparation could include preemption or “anticipatory self-defense.” The precise origins of anticipatory self-defense under international law (customary international law) lie in the Caroline, a case that concerned the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada against British rule. Following this case, the serious threat of armed attack has generally justified certain militarily defensive actions. In an exchange of diplomatic notes between the governments of the United States and Great Britain, then U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster outlined a framework for self-defense that did not require an antecedent attack. Here, the jurisprudential framework permitted a military response to a threat so long as the danger posed was “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” See: Beth M. Polebaum, “National Self-defense in International Law: An Emerging Standard for a Nuclear Age,” 59 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 187, 190-91 (1984) (noting that the Caroline case had transformed the right of self-defense from an excuse for armed intervention into a legal doctrine). Still earlier, see: Hugo Grotius, Of the Causes of War, and First of Self-Defense, and Defense of Our Property, reprinted in 2 Classics of International Law, 168-75 (Carnegie Endowment Trust, 1925) (1625); and Emmerich de Vattel, The Right of Self-Protection and the Effects of the Sovereignty and Independence of Nations, reprinted in 3 Classics of International Law, 130 (Carnegie Endowment Trust, 1916) (1758). Also, Samuel Pufendorf, The Two Books on the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, 32 (Frank Gardner Moore., tr., 1927 (1682).
[19] The origins of this phrase lie on Herman Kahn’s classic texts, On Thermonuclear War (1960, Princeton) and Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962, Horizon).
[20] One may think here of the High Lama’s warning in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “The storm…this storm that you talk of…It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos…The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world is a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary.”
Photo of letter from General Maxwell D. Taylor provided to JURIST
