conan
21
Damn…forced me to like your post.
What is this world is coming too?
1 Like
zantax
22
Won’t stop a future President challenging it as a usurpation of his office.
I don’t know if it can.
There’s an argument that Congress could outlaw the use of nuclear weapons entirely - but it gets dicey if they try to legislate when they can be used.
1 Like
I agree, the last few months of the last Presidency really put this in focus, if the President ever became unstable, what would stop them?
Jezcoe
25
What President would spend political capital saying “You know what we need again? A power to end civilization vested into one person. Who is with me?”
And yet his job approval numbers have not gone lower then 53.8%.
zantax
27
Pretty sure his argument would be about the constitution, not give me the nukes so I can blow stuff up.
So it sounds like a “get permission first” law would be constitutional.
Jezcoe
30
But that is the desire.
That is what the politics of it actually is.
zantax
31
Not sure we will always have time for committee meeting before they need to be used. How much warning would we get?
And yikes, how did we ever allow this to happen?
from Launch on warning - Wikipedia
In 1997, the Clinton administration changed the official policy away from launch on warning to one of retaliation after withstanding an initial first strike.[6]
Jezcoe
32
Here is where it is expected that I will defend the actions of a President I didn’t really like.
zantax
33
Actually, I was kind of hoping you would agree that voluntarily absorbing a first strike is insane.
Jezcoe
34
To be honest… does it really matter at that point?
The world is over no matter what.
zantax
35
Depends who launched it and how many they launched. But a first strike can impede your follow up.
Jezcoe
36
Not really.
We would blow up the world two times over instead of three times over.
zantax
37
You think the world is going to end if NK launches one nuclear missile at us?
Jezcoe
38
If NK launches a nuke then NK would cease to exist very soon afterwards.
That would launch a chain of events that would cause a massive amount of death and destruction.
There are no backsies when it comes to using nukes.
zantax
39
I don’t think we would retaliate against that with a nuke, they could be amply reprimanded with conventional bombs. Don’t want to get fall out on another large nuclear power.
JayJay
40
There’s nothing in the Constitution that gives him this power.
It was claimed as an “inherent power” out of necessity when the decision to deploy needed to be made in minutes.
Not sure if the constitutionality of the term “inherent power” was ever tested.