Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
civilian casualties, urban bombardment, etc. →
evasion of responsibility
(I sent this to a mailing list I’m on.
Someone posted links to the video of U.S. casualties that’s been doing the rounds, and there followed a debate over whether this was appropriate, and whether this sort of footage was good or bad to view or to encourage people to view.)
I’ll lay it on the table:
I don’t think that George Bush and his crew value human life to an extent that I consider safe.
I think they have grand plans on a large scale for how they want to remake the world, its nations, the stories writ large on history, and so forth.
This is, from one point of view, entirely appropriate for people in their position.
But it also means that when they’re deciding whether or not to take an action that might result in, say, civilian casualties in Iraq, their calculations are done at this grand scale, their considerations are along the lines of:
will this change the way other civilians react towards our soldiers?
will this change the way Arab media report on our actions?
will this put additional pressure on regional governments to strengthen their opposition to us?
will this do significant damage to a strategically important target?
will this strengthen the resolve of Iraqi troops?
will this encourage terrorism against U.S. targets elsewhere?
And other good, solid, strategic considerations.
For the civilian casualties themselves, and those who love them, and those who witness their dismemberment without having to click on a link to do so, there’s another element to the calculation.
To people who believe that the suffering an Iraqi brother feels for the death of an Iraqi brother is of the same sort as the suffering I would feel for the death of my brother, this is an element in our calculation as well.
I don’t think this makes it into the calculation of people who think like George Bush and his crew.
I honestly do not think that they value the lives of the people that they are killing as human lives, but only regret their deaths occasionally out of rhetorical necessity or strategic calculation.
I think people whose ambition carry them to the sorts of offices George Bush and his crew occupy, who dash out position papers full of empire and realpolitik, who dream up “shock and awe” and so forth, have for the most part given up this ability.
I think they’ve convinced themselves that they’ve done this for good reasons, reasons that are, when seen from the perspective of The Big Picture, actually better ways of addressing the very concerns I’m accusing them of ignoring.
They think that people who include the pain of an anguished Iraqi brother in their calculations are dangerously naïve and sentimental.
A nation full of television generals, op-ed writers, and policy-makers are pleased to agree.
I think they’re completely, tragically wrong.
Any justification for loosing the dogs of war that is true and right and good shouldn’t have to leave out the suffering of its victims.
You shouldn’t say that D-Day was justified because of Hitler’s evil and so it doesn’t matter about the people who suffered and died there.
You should try to be able to say that D-Day was justified because of Hitler’s evil even considering the suffering and the people who died there.
It does no honor to the people who die in war to hide from how they died or what happened to their corpses afterwards.
Better we should learn which one died the worst death and study the details so that we can tell ourselves honestly “this was the cost” and can decide whether we can really say “and it was worth it.”
And of course this criticism can be extended to critics of the war, who had better form a vivid picture of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers before spouting any jawclap about respecting the sovereignty of his government.
I saw a picture of an Iraqi child covered in burns from one of the bombings.
I think that the people who insisted that this child had to suffer in order to liberate Iraq would have gone through a different, more honest mental calculation if instead of deciding this a planet’s-width away from a child they’d never see, they decided it with the flamethrower in their hands and the child in front of them.
Maybe they’d decide the same way, but they’d decide knowing the real cost of their decisions.
I think if George Bush had to personally burn, dismember, and crush the victims of his war, he would lose the heart for it.
He would beg for excuses to try some other way with even more desperation than he in fact searched for reasons to go to war.
The gruesome technology that allows him and people like him to rain death on people from a distance shields them from seeing the consequences of their actions except as results that can fit into a framework preselected to exclude non-abstract considerations of human suffering.
And I think this disease is widespread.
And I think one potential cure is the sort of shocking footage we’ve been arguing about.
It may or may not end up being effective, but most of the arguments I’ve heard against it sound like symptoms of the disease rather than arguments against the efficacy of the treatment.
Iraqis are being killed, as they were yesterday and the day before.
At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we’ll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country and we’ll be able to pare down the coalition security forces in the country.
I continue to be struck by how people morally evaluate the killing of innocent people.
There’s an implicit heuristic at work that includes the race or nationality of the perpetrator and victim, whether or not that person was part of a uniformed and organized military force, how expensive and high-tech was the equipment used, and whether the perpetrator and victim might have been able to look each other in the eye.
I sometimes wish that this heuristic could be made explicit, because I think people would disavow much of it then.
More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip.
It’s no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children “terror.” Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1.
According to B’Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers:
598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent.
Take note of the ages, too.
According to B’Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died.
The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli.
Yet it is not on the public agenda.
Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
With America choosing the Israeli path of peacemaking by attempting to conquer, subdue, and humiliate our enemies (a path that, to be fair, they might well have learned through emulating American policy by playing Cowboys & Indians), we can start asking those questions too.
While 150% of Israeli children’s deaths had resulted in headline coverage (some deaths generated multiple stories), only 5% of Palestinian children’s deaths received similar coverage.
The Progressive, in , carried an article from Milton Mayer about tax resistance:
Young men are a dime a dozen.
What the Army wants is a dime to buy a dozen young men with.
Either give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but stop asking, “What can an old man do?”
April 15 is the date.
April 15 is the date you turn over a quarter of your income to Behemoth, and half to three-quarters of what you turn over goes to the Army to buy a dozen young men to populate (and depopulate) Perforation Paddy.
“I sent them a good boy,” said Private Meadlo’s mother after Mylai, “and they made him a murderer.”
If you want it, buy it.
If you don’t, don’t. But stop asking, “What can an old man do?”
If, like me, you had a good year and made more than $625 in , the Internal Revenue Act requires you to file an income tax return.
If you refuse (rather than evade) the requirement to file, you are still a felon, but you should notify Behemoth and all its minions lest you be hanged for the wrong reason.
(The Act simply punishes “failure to file” and “failure to pay”.)
I shouldn’t refuse to file, myself, but better men than I have taken the position that filing is more than a formality; the best of them, A.J. Muste, always filed an appropriately marked Bible instead of a return.
So, too, as the antics proceed, you will be asked (unless you have a readily attachable pay-check) where you stash your money so that Behemoth’s little boys in blue can go and get it.
Here again I should comply, myself, lest Behemoth get the impression that I am playing a cat-and-mouse (or mouse-and-cat) game.
But this decision, too, like whether or not to file a return, is probably a matter of temperament.
The purpose of taxation is to enable people collectively to buy what they want.
Sometimes when some of them want a little something special and some of them don’t — for instance, throughways financed by tolls — those who want them pay for them and those who don’t want them don’t. But Mylai is financed by the general fund of the Treasury, on the assumption that everybody wants Mylai.
Behemoth has no way of knowing that the assumption is false unless those who don’t want it refuse to buy it.
A vote for Nixon (or Humphrey) or Johnson (or Goldwater) is a vote for Mylai.
(“It was murder.
We were shooting into houses and at people — running or standing, doing nothing.” — Sergeant Charles Hutts.)
The nation-state is not merely fallible; it is, as every Judeo-Christian (or Christeo-Judean) schoolboy knows, unholy because it divides the family of man into we and they.
Only men are, or may be, holy in a world of nation-states, and they dare not perform an unholy act to preserve such an institution.
Still the conscientious tax refuser is a conscientious citizen of the nation-state.
He would gladly pay his taxes for the things all the people in it (including him) want.
In Norway (in this respect the only even halfway civilized country in the world) the conscientious citizen may have his tax payment segregated for the support of the United Nations if he does not want to buy Mylai.
Bucking always for salvation, the conscientious citizen is nevertheless up against some serious objections to his refusal to send a dozen young men to the edge of the ditch in Mylai.
The objections appear to be six in number:
Objection 1: The legal penalty of five years in stir and/or a ten-thousand-dollar fine.
The U.S. Government has not yet pressed for the penalty in any case of tax refusal that I know of — partly, I suppose, because Behemoth does not know what to do about conscience, partly because the use of force, violence, and other lawful means of penalizing conscientious people always increases their number.
(Better pretend they’re not there — up to a point.)
But the number is increasing anyway, and it is not unlikely that it is approaching that point.
When it is confident that it has got its Haynsworth-Carswell Court, Behemoth may feel constrained some one of these days to press for the penalty.
The tax refusal movement, for twenty years amorphous, is now coordinated by War Tax Resistance, whose address, I am reliably informed, is 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, and whose telephone number (212‒477‒2970) was discovered in the Manhattan telephone directory by a task force of forty FBI agents led personally by J. Edgar Hoover.
Desperado Bradford Lyttle of WTR reports 181 active refusal centers across the country and estimates 15,000 refusers in .
Answer to Objection 1: There are worse things than losing five years and/or ten thousand dollars, and Mylai is one of them.
Objection 2: The loss of job or reputation.
Ten years ago (even five) many tax refusers lost jobs (or failed to get them) as a consequence of the invariable FBI “inquiry.”
That’s less likely (but only less likely) now.
Loss of reputation, on the other hand, has never appeared to be consequential; I have never known anybody to the left of Orange County, California, who thought that a tax refuser was anything worse than crazy, and even in Orange County they hate taxes.
Answer to Objection 2: There are worse things than losing a job (though that is easier for a light-fingered clown like me to say than it is for an honest workingman).
We proceed now from the nuts-and-bolts to the nitty-gritty, as follows:
Objection 3: Tax refusal is ineffective because “they” get the money anyway (by force, violence, or other lawful means).
Answer to Objection 3: True, true; but, then, so is everything else ineffective (including two victorious world wars to save the world for democracy).
To man, all things are impossible.
If whatever you do is ineffective, you might as well buck for salvation and do what is right.
Objection 4: Tax refusal is illogical: If you refuse to pay half your income tax, half of what you do pay will be used for Mylai, as will more than the other half (since Behemoth, when it seizes the other half by force, violence, and other lawful means will also seize twelve per cent per annum interest on it).
Answer to Objection 4: This is true only if logic is a brance of effectiveness — and even then it is only half true.
Behemoth will lose money on the deal because it will have to spend more to collect it than it gets.
In one instance I know of, where the refuser took his case “on up,” it must have cost $25,000 in salaries and travel expenses of Treasury and FBI dicks, district attorneys, assistant attorneys-general, judges, and court attachés to collect and hold on to $32.27 (and the refuser took his own expenses in the case as a tax deduction).
It is true, none the less, that in the end Behemoth will get all the money it wants for Mylai, by raising this tax rate if necessary.
But there is another, and more significant, logic: the logic of symbolism (not to be confused with symbolic logic).
The only action a man can take against the nation-state is symbolic.
He can not prevent its depredations but only repudiate them persistently in the hope of (a) salvation and (b) the sympathetic infection of his fellow-citizens.
It is not logical symbolically (for instance) to bomb the ROTC building, because people sympathize with the victim of a bombing, and, besides, Behemoth has all the ROTC buildings it wants and is always eager to build new ones and add the building costs to its Gross National Product billboard.
(The Army doesn’t need ROTC buildings or ROTC except as a symbol of militarism; no European army would dare ask a university to disgrace itself by letting its students be marched around the premises.)
What is logical symbolically is for students to sit nonviolently in front of the ROTC building and be hauled violently away.
Tax refusal is logical symbolically.
Objection 5: Tax refusal is a disavowal of representative government.
Answer to Objection 5: It is, if, and only if, by representative government is meant majoritarianism and not representation at all.
If you are an American citizen and you do not want Mylai and won’t buy it, you are not represented.
The Congressmen (including the Senators) who deplore Mylai all buy it, without exception.
The last one who wouldn’t was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted all alone against the second go-around of the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.
The conscientious citizen who does not want Mylai and will not buy it is driven to self-government by the failure of representative government to represent him.
Objection 6: Tax refusal is anarchy, and anarchy is the worst thing that can befall society.
Answer to Objection 6: Anarchy is not the worst thing that can befall a society; it is the second worst.
The worst is tyranny, and the worst tyranny is self-evidently that which requires the innocent to kill the innocent.
(“I love women.
I love children, too.
I love people.” — Lt. William L. Calley.)
He who does not want and will not buy tyranny must, like George Washington, take his chances on anarchy.
So hopelessly unholy is the nation-state that it drives the conscientious citizen to anarchy and then accuses him of driving it to anarchy when he tries to disengage himself from its tyranny.
In the interesting case of the $32.27 cited above, Attorney Francis Heisler was arguing for the refuser before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and one of the judges said to him: “Counsel, is your client aware that if this Court holds in his behalf the Court itself will be laying the axe to the root of all established government?”
“I think he is, your honor,” Attorney Heisler replied.
The objections considered, we proceed to the obstacles.
There is only one that appears to be insuperable: withholding, the worst crime ever committed against liberty by a good man.
When Beardsley Ruml thought up “pay-as-you-go,” everybody cheered except the company bosses who had to do the detestable New Deal’s detestable bookkeeping for it.
(Anybody remember when the Connecticut manufacturer, Vivian Kellems, led the Old Guard attack on Social Security by refusing to make the employe deductions?)
Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. They can sue to recover — some have — but nobody has made it to the Supreme Court yet.
Others reduce or eliminate the withholding by claiming excess dependents (the whole population of Vietnam, for instance) in calculating their estimated tax.
Again, I suppose, a matter of temperament, and mine doesn’t happen to run that cat-and-mouse way — though their cause is just, and we have indeed made the whole population of Vietnam our dependents.
A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai.
The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated.
(Personally leading a task force of eighty FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover discovered the association by looking in the Philadelphia telephone directory, so there is no point in my denying it.)
But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington.
Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.
A few years ago a new form of refusal got rolling, available to people trapped by withholding.
This was non-payment of the telephone tax (which goes into the general Treasury), on the ground that Chairman Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee had argued its necessity for continuance of the war against Mylai.
I’m uneasy about the telephone tax refusal myself; again, I suppose, a matter of temperament.
There seem to me to be two visible arguments, and one invisible, against it.
First, I can not bring myself either to do or not to do anything on the bases that what a Congressman says is true.
And second, it seems to me that if you are going to fight City Hall you should go for the jugular.
The income tax is the jugular.
The telephone tax is one of those petty excises, no more significant fiscally, and no more to be singled out, Congressman Mills to the contrary notwithstanding, than the whiskey, movie, or airplane tax.
But the invisible, base-of-the-iceberg, stem-of-the-martini-cherry argument for paying the phone tax is, I’m afraid, one of craven convenience.
If Behemoth were to put me in jail for five years for income tax refusal, I’d refuse to pay my telephone tax instantly.
But living where and how I do, running a little back-bedroom sweatshop out in the country, I can’t make it very well (still worse, very sick) without a telephone.
Discussing telephone tax refusal with some of my anarchist friends, I have discovered that some of them were for it because they didn’t feel quite up to going to the mat on the income tax, and still others because they understood that the telephone company, like Vivian Kellems, was no more enthusiastic about collecting the Mylai tax than they were about paying it and would not jerk the phone out for non-payment of the tax.
This last seemed to me to be a misreading of history.
Unlike Vivian Kellems and the American Friends Service Committee — Right and Left united across the years by the mounting terror of the Middle — the telephone company has no principle except money; and Behemoth’s agent, the Federal Communications Commission, is where the money is.
In the Communist countries like Spain and Greece and, come to think of it, every other country in the world, the post office operates the telephone and telegraph systems, whose profits subsidize the carrying of the mails; in the only truly free country in the free world the money-losing branch of the communications system is communized and the money-making branches are Government-protected private monopolies.
But telephone tax refusal caught on until, according to the calculation of War Tax Resistance, there are now more than 100,000 practitioners of it.
For a couple of years nobody did anything about them.
But reports have begun to filter in of Government agents swarming over refusers and, more ominously, of the jerking of telephones by the company on behalf of its protector, the Government.
As the reports spread it may be anticipated that there will be a falling-away of telephone tax anarchists, as, I suppose, there will be of income tax anarchists when Behemoth decides that they are getting to be too much of a nuisance and starts throwing them into the pokey.
Until that time the only obstacle (not objection) to income tax refusal, other than withholding, is the harassment it entails.
The smart way to live alongside Behemoth is not to attract his attention, and whoever attracts his attention is in for it.
Twenty years ago he was paying his harassers $40 a day.
It must be $80 now, or $100; there is nothing niggardly about Behemoth.
He sends two kinds of harassers around.
The first is a ritualistic cut-out character whom it’s a positive pleasure to be harassed by.
He is the warm handclasp type, around thirty-five and running to pudge from running around in his down-payment Impala.
He wants to have a little talk with you.
“Homyonum’s the name, Mr. Murgatroid, from the Internal Revenue Service.”
(Warm handclasp.)
“Sit down, Homyonum, sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.”
“To be perfectly frank, Mr. Murgatroid, I think that I may be able to do something for you.”
“Well, now, Homyonum, that is nice — I never expected the Internal Revenue Service to do something for me.
Do sit down and have a nice glass tea.”
(He will, and he does.)
“Mr. Murgatroid, we of the Treasury Department are actually your agents.
We are here to help you.”
“How sweet of you, Homyonum.
One lump or two?”
(Two.)
“Mr. Murgatroid, I want you to know that I respect your position, but I think you are ill-advised to refuse to pay your income tax.”
“Homyonum, my boy, your advice is ill.
Milk?
Lemon?”
(Milk.)
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Murgatroid?”
“Not at all, and do let me tell you why your advice is ill.
If my position is, as you say, respectable, then yours is not, since the two positions are contradictory.
Do you follow me?”
“I —.”
“What I am trying to tell you, Homyonum, since you respect my position, is that you are trying to tell me that I ought not to pay my income tax and neither ought you.
You do want to be respectable, don’t you?”
A little more of this standoff, a warm handclasp, and Homyonum is gone wherever such people go nights and is seen no more.
He makes his report, the report spends two or three months going through channels, and then Behemoth hands one of his judges a distraint warrant to sign and sends one of his blue-boys around to attach your unattached property (money in the bank, wages coming in, shoes off your feet) in the amount in which you are delinquent in buying Mylai.
The other kind of harasser is another glass tea entirely.
He is tall, sallow, dour, ulcerated: a certified public accountant who doesn’t know anything about your income tax refusal (he says), but has been sent to audit your return.
“I suppose,” he says, “that your name came up on a spot check.
Of course you have all your records and a receipt for each expenditure — if I may just look at them.”
At the end of two weeks, at $40, $80, or $100 a day, reducing the Gross National Product by that much, he has discovered that you owe Behemoth $1.14 (or Behemoth owes you $1.14; that’s not the point of it at all) and you and your back-bedroom are a shambles.
He turns up the next year, on the dot, to do it all over again, and then you know he is lying about the spot check (and even he beginst to suspect he is).
Meanwhile, he has converted you into a fox.
You spend half your life (at $40, $20, or $10 a day) keeping records of your expenditures.
You spend the other half of your life like the mouse you were not going to play in the cat-and-mouse game, scurrying for loopholes down which you can hurry.
You end up beating your wife, cursing your children, and, of course, kicking the cat.
And that, not the $1.14, is the point of it.
If Behemoth can make your life unbearable, you will buy Mylai.
It is the very devil to be harassed, but what did you expect — a valentine from Mrs. Mitchell?
It’s like (or even as) Give-’Em-Hell-Harry used to say: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
You harass them, and they harass you back, and they’ve got the big battalions on their side.
(You know Whom you’ve got on yours.)
And you harass them back and they harass you back.
Who said ineffective? Behemoth has the whole country, the whole world, computerized to take care of everything — everything but one man who says, No, sir, instead of Yes, sir.
It takes one (count ’em, one) man to obstruct the machine by introducing the human element into it.
The grind-organ monkey is suddenly a monkey-wrench.
I put it to you: What more can an old man do?
The machine has not been built yet, and won’t be, that does not come down with the gripes while it digests a human being.
Mind you, I am not advocating income tax refusal; not I. For all I know the advocacy itself constitutes a felony, especially if it creates a clear and present danger that the Army won’t be able to buy a dozen young men with machine guns at the edge of the ditch in Mylai.
Operating on a very low and cautious level, I say unto you only, Give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but don’t ask, “What can an old man do?”
If you want Mylai, buy it; if you don’t want it, don’t. That’s the free enterprise system, and do you believe in the free enterprise system or are you some kind of a Communist?
Operating on the highest level of all, under a law that even the Supreme Court (Girouard, etc.) admits is higher than the Internal Revenue Act, Jesus Christ was asked by the Pharisees whose the tribute money was, and you know what he said and you know that he said it perceiving their wickedness.
(Matt. 22:18.) If you have to choose between Christ and the Pharisee who, like the Pharisee of old, occupies the highest seat in the Temple, you are in a tight spot.
I’d play it safe myself: Better to do time than eternity.
A biographical note accompanying the article says that “Mr. Mayer began his own tax refusal adventures more than twenty years ago.
(He is the anti-hero of the $32.27 case he cites in this article.)”
One question Fazillah cannot answer for her son is whether anyone asked the question at all of whether to kill his father.
Forbes reports that the Air Force has 65,000–70,000 analysts processing drone video surveillance; a Rand review states they actually need half again that number to properly handle the data.
Asked to point to the human who actually made the decision to kill her husband, she can only point to another machine.
So who does Fazillah blame?
Whom does one blame when confronted with the actions of a machine?
Our Pakistani friend asks, “What kind of a democracy is America where people do not ask these questions?”
Becoming an actual democracy, with an actual choice at election time between war and peace rather than between political machines vying for the chance to bring us war, seems to many Americans, if some of the less-reported polls are to be believed, a nearly unachievable goal.
The United States has become a process that churns out war — today Afghanistan and (in any real sense) Iraq; tomorrow Iran and Pakistan, with China securely, however distantly, on the horizon — and for those of us with any concern for peace, a principled opposition to war ultimately requires a determination to make the United States at long last into a democracy, striving as Dr. King enjoined us, in “molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.”
It must begin with compassion — powerless compassion perhaps, perhaps only the ghost of dissent, but compassion for people like Fazillah and Aymal — and with deciding to be human, maybe only the ghost of a human, but alive in some way and alive to what our assent and perhaps especially our silence are accomplishing in the world.
Humanity is the first thing to be won back — and then, if we have the strength, relentlessly defended — against indifference, complacency, and, above all, inaction.
If enough of us refuse to be machines, if enough of us refuse enough, can democracy, and even peace, not be at last achieved?
But first comes the refusal.
by Dave Merrill, Nafeesa Syeed, and Brittany Harris; edited by David M. Gross
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have repeatedly accused each other of lacking the fitness, temperament, and qualifications to be commander-in-chief. Clinton has said Trump isn’t someone “we can trust with nuclear weapons.” Trump has called Clinton “close to unhinged.” How much power does the president alone have to launch a nuclear strike? Bloomberg News asked Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman missile-launch officer and research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, to spell out the step-by-step procedure.
The president considers a nuclear strike
The commander-in-chief’s power is clear: He or she has sole authority to useinitiate the process by which Americans could attack people with nuclear weapons.
The top brass is brought in
Before initiating military action, the president convenes a conference with military and civilian advisers in Washington and around the world to talk through options. In the White House, the call takes place in the Situation Room. If traveling, the president is patched in on a secure line. A key participant in the meeting: the Pentagon’s deputy director of operations, an officer in charge of the National Military Command Center, also known as the “war room.” This around-the-clock operations center is would be responsible for preparing and ultimately transmitting were they to prepare and ultimately transmit a launch order from the president. The head of all U.S. strategic nuclear forces at Strategic Command in Omaha would probably also be asked for a briefing on strike options.
[Time elapsed: less than one minute]
The consultation lasts as long as the president wishes, but if enemy missiles are believed to be heading toward the U.S. and the president must decides to order a counter-strike, the consultation may last just 30 seconds. The tight time line raises the risk of launching hastily on a false warning.
The president decides to launch
Some advisers may try to change the president’s mind or resign in protest—but ultimately, someone in the Pentagon must may comply with the commander-in-chief’s order.
The order is verified A senior officer may verify the order
For the strike to be carried out according to plan, tThe senior officer in the Pentagon war room must formally authenticate that the person ordering the strike is indeed the president. The officer reads a “challenge code,” often two phonetic letters from the military alphabet, such as “Delta-Echo.” The president retrieves the “biscuit,” a laminated card the president or military aide carries at all times, and finds the matching response to the challenge code: “Charlie-Zulu,” for instance.
If tThe order goes out
The war room may then prepares the launch order, a message that contains the chosen war plan, time to launch, authentication codes and codes needed to unlock the missiles before firing them. The encoded and encrypted message is only about 150 characters long, about the length of a tweet. Those in the war room may decide to It is broadcast it to each worldwide command and directly to launch crews.
[Time elapsed: two or three minutes]
The submarine and ICBM crews receive the message within seconds of the broadcast. Just a few minutes have passed since the initial conference call.
Launch crews take over
Launch message in hand, the crews may decide to open locked safes to obtain sealed-authentication system (SAS) codes prepared by the National Security Agency and distributed throughout the military’s nuclear chain of command. They may compare the SAS codes in the launch order with those in their safes.
If the missiles are to be launched from a submarine:
The captain, executive officer, and two others may choose to authenticate the order. The launch message provides the combination to an on-board safe holding the “fire-control” key needed to deploy the missiles. Missiles are can be made ready for launch about 15 minutes after receiving the order.
If the missiles are to be launched from land:
Five launch crews in various underground centers control a squadron of 50 missiles. Each crew consists of two officers. The individual teams are spread miles apart. Each receives the orders, opens and then must decide whether to open their safes and compares their SAS codes to those sent by the war room. If they match, the crews may decide to enter the message’s war plan number into their launch computers to re-target missiles from their peacetime targets in the ocean to their new targets where people live. Using additional codes in the message, the crews must choose whether to enter a few more keystrokes to unlock the missiles before turning and even to turn the launch keys retrieved from their safe. At the designated launch time, any or all of the five crews may turn their keys simultaneously, sending up to five “votes” to the missiles.
Effective mMutiny is unlikelyhas been made difficult
It takes just two “votes” to launch the missiles. So even if three two-officer ICBM crews refuse to carry out the order, it won’t stop the launch.
If mMissiles are launched
In the worst-case scenario, aAbout five minutes may elapse from the president’s decision until intercontinental ballistic missiles blast out of their silos, and about fifteen minutes until submarine missiles shoot out of their tubes. Once fired, nobody can call back the missiles and their warheads cannot be called back.
