"Scarborough then asked a hypothetical question to Hayden about how quickly nuclear weapons could be deployed if a president were to give approval.
"It's scenario dependent, but the system is designed for speed and decisiveness. It's not designed to debate the decision," Hayden said. Hayden was CIA director from 2006 to 2009 during the George W. Bush presidency. He was the National Security Agency director from 1999 to 2005, spanning the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush."
- http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/03/trump-asks-why-us-cant-use-nuk...
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"What would it mean to have Trump’s fingers on the nuclear button? We don't really know, but we do know this: In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. You might imagine this awesome executive power would be hamstrung with checks and balances, but by law, custom and congressional deference there may be no responsibility where the president has more absolute control. There is no advice and consent by the Senate. There is no second-guessing by the Supreme Court. Even ordering the use of torture—which Trump infamously once said he would do, insisting the military “won’t refuse. They’re not gonna refuse me”—imposes more legal constraints on a president than ordering a nuclear attack.
If he were president, Donald Trump—who likes to say he doesn't spend a lot of time conferring with others ("My primary consultant is myself," he declared in March)—would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.
The “nuclear button” is a metaphor for a complex apparatus that has the president’s brain at its apex. The image of a commander in chief simply pressing a button captures none of the machinery, people and procedures designed to inform the president and translate his or her decisions into coherent action. Although it remains shrouded in secrecy, we actually know a great deal about it, beginning with the president’s first task of opening the “nuclear suitcase” in an emergency to review his nuclear attack options. If we shine our light at the tactical and timing considerations of how a first- or second-strike attack would unfold, and at the inner workings of the nuclear decision process from the standpoint of the White House, we gain a much better idea of a presidential candidate’s fitness for this responsibility. And here it is essential to consider a candidate’s temperament and character—especially in situations of extreme stress. Decisiveness is important, but so is prudence.
Let us say the president is awakened in the middle of the night (the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call) by his or her top nuclear adviser and told of an incoming nuclear strike. Since the flight time of missiles fired from launch stations in Russia or China to the White House is 30 minutes, and 12 minutes or less for missiles fired from submarines lurking in the Western Atlantic Ocean (Russian subs historically favor a patrol area to the west of Bermuda), the steadiness and brainpower of the commander in chief in such circumstances are serious questions indeed. The voting public must ask whether a given candidate would remain calm—or panic, become discombobulated and driven to order an immediate nuclear response on the basis of false information.
This call has never happened, but if it ever does, the situation would be as stressful and dangerous as things ever get inside the Oval Office. The closest we came to such a call occurred in 1979, when the consoles at our early warning hub in Colorado lit up with indications of a large-scale Soviet missile attack. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, received back-to-back calls in the middle of the night informing him of the imminent nuclear destruction of the United States. The second call reported an all-out attack. Brzezinski was seconds away from waking Carter to pass on the dreadful news and convince him of the need to order retaliation without delay (within a six-minute deadline). Brzezinski was sure the end was near.
Just before he picked up the phone to call Carter, Brzezinski received a third call, this time canceling the alarm. It was a mistake caused by human and technical error. A training tape simulating an all-out Soviet attack had inadvertently slipped into the actual real-time attack early warning network. The impending nuclear holocaust was a mirage that confused the duty crew. (They were fired for taking eight minutes instead of the required three minutes to declare their degree of confidence that an attack against North America was underway.)
How would a President Trump behave under such duress, informed of the attack and the imminent destruction of the nation’s capital and himself? He would have only a few minutes to consider the reliability of the attack report and decide whether and how to retaliate. If the attack is real, and he hesitates, a president will likely be killed and the chain of command decapitated, perhaps permanently. During the short countdown to impact, he also will be advised by the head of the Strategic Command in Omaha (or the officer on duty that night if the four-star head of Strategic Command cannot get onto the conference call on time) that the incoming attack will destroy the bulk of the U.S. land-based strategic missile force unless the president makes a timely decision ordering their egress from their underground silos before incoming warheads arrive. Furthermore, he will hear that the loss of this land-based force will mean that the goals of the U.S. war plan will not be realizable. (These goals require the ability to destroy the vast bulk of the Russia target base consisting of just under 1,000 aim points and of the China target base of just under 500 aim points.)"
- http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-tr...
