President Biden has recently been assailed by a wave of commentaries contending he is too old to serve a second term. Opinion surveys indicate many voters share the same concern.
This isn’t surprising. Not only is Biden the oldest chief executive in the nation’s history, but at 80 years of age he is well past the life expectancy for an average American male (generally pegged in the mid-70s).
His public appearances often reinforce the impression that he is elderly, and to some degree age-impaired.
The link between advanced age and diminished cognition is well established. Loss of memory, reduced attention span, faulty reasoning ability and the like vary from person to person, but as one learned source puts it, when people get old, “cognitive decline is inevitable.”
Curiously, though, few commentators mention the most important reason why having an old person at the apex of the federal government is a dangerous thing. That has to do with the fact the president has exclusive, unfettered authority to launch U.S. nuclear weapons.
As Bruce Blair, a seminal thinker on nuclear command and control, put it in a 2016 article for Politico, “the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy,” because the chief executive has “absolute control” over whether the nation launches its most fearsome weapons.
At every level below the president in the nuclear chain of command, there are checks on the unilateral ability of commanders to employ nuclear weapons. An elaborate system exists to prevent what Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley described in a 2021 memo as “an illegal, unauthorized or accidental launch.”
However, there is no check at the top of the system. The president decides, period. Nobody has the formal authority to second-guess a presidential launch decision, even if the president appears to be exhibiting diminished capacity.
Conversely, no matter how great the emergency in which the nation might find itself, no official in the system has authority to countermand a presidential decision not to launch nuclear weapons.
This has profound implications for the nation. For all its sophistication and complexity—there are 200 separate systems in the nuclear command and control network—the deterrence of nuclear war depends ultimately on the fear of aggressors that use of weapons of mass destruction might trigger intolerable damage to their own nation and power.
The whole system depends on the threat of retaliation, because no nation has an effective defense against large-scale nuclear attack. When a typical warhead in the Russian nuclear arsenal can destroy 36 square miles of a city, and the Russians have 1,500 warheads capable of hitting America, it isn’t hard to see why effective defense seems impossible.
So our survival relies, first and foremost, on the adversary’s belief that a nuclear attack on America will unleash a response in kind.
But deterrence isn’t just about having the necessary military hardware. The threat of retaliation has to be credible, meaning the response has to be proportional to the provocation and the president’s will to execute said response must be believable.
So now imagine a scenario that might arise during Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House. A Russian (or Chinese) leader decides it is possible to gain strategic advantage by disarming America in a surprise attack.
The first step in any such move would likely be to destroy Washington in what is known as a decapitating attack, and then quickly follow up by targeting U.S. submarine bases, bomber fields and missile silos before the command chain can regroup.
The U.S. Strategic Command is constantly exercising to assure that such an attack will not be successful, but the key to the arrangement is the willingness of the president to act quickly and decisively.
How quickly? If the initial wave of attacks is launched from submerged submarines west of Bermuda (a favorite Russian deployment area), the president could have less than ten minutes to respond.
During that time, he must determine that warnings of an attack are accurate, assess the scope of the aggression, confer with available security experts, select appropriate responses, and then convey the “emergency action message” authorizing launch to appropriate commanders.
That’s a lot to do in less than ten minutes. It’s the reason why the president’s nuclear communications equipment, including launch options and authentication codes, are always nearby.
So now, factor in the possibility that the president is enfeebled, barely awake, and burdened with the awareness that he will be dead within minutes. Investing an elderly chief executive with sole authority to launch or not launch in such a high-stress situation sounds like a catastrophe waiting to happen.
The fate of the republic might very well hang on the president’s ability to interpret attack warning correctly, quickly assess options, and clearly direct military action. It’s the kind of scenario where you want the chief executive at the top of his game, clear-headed and analytic.
When Bruce Blair wrote his 2016 piece for Politico, he was focused on the prospect of having a man of Donald Trump’s temperament at the apex of the command chain. Joe Biden is a very different kind of person, but there are valid reasons to wonder whether he would function as needed in what could be the final moments of the American experiment.
The scenario might be more likely in a crisis if the enemy has reason to suspect the president would be too disoriented to act with dispatch and deliberation. It wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Biden has stumbled.
I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. If he runs in 2024 and his opponent is Donald Trump, I will probably vote for him again. But perhaps the best minds in the security community should give some thought to how we can refine nuclear launch procedures to take into account the fallibility of our top leader.
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