Radiolab on NPR nuclear war episode stating that trump can nuke at will:

[mucifer]

http://www.radiolab.org/story/nukes/

President Richard Nixon once boasted that at any moment he could pick up a telephone and - in 20 minutes - kill 60 million people. Such is the power of the US President over the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But what if you were the military officer on the receiving end of that phone call? Could you refuse the order?

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]

1. I was in Minot, in '73, during the Yom Kippur War when Nixon (Kissinger) took us to DefCon 3 . . .

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:

"For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert -- alert in a two-fold sense:

"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

[longship]

2. At the very end of the podcast there is an eyewitness account of the Castle Bravo test.

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: