Letter: Kaboom!

We survivors of the Cold War have many stories, but I want to focus on one issue: presidential power and the atom bomb. As Tom Nichols writes in his article, “The President’s Weapon,” in The Atlantic's August issue, “For 80 years, the president of the United States has remained the sole authority who can order the use of American nuclear weapons. If the commander in chief wishes to launch a sudden, unprovoked strike, or escalate a conventional conflict, or retaliate against a single nuclear aggression with all-out nuclear war, the choice is his and his alone.” In our current landscape of intercontinental ballistic missiles, unlike the Russian TU-95 bombers my fellow airmen and I worried about, the response time to a threat is measured in minutes rather than hours. The president must be prepared to act in that timeframe. My question is: Who do we trust to wield such power? Do we have the assurance that an impulsive megalomaniac won’t pull the trigger on a whim?