The Case of Major Hering

Harold Hering was a major in the Air Force. He had served twenty-one years in the Air Force, serving five tours in Vietnam as a helicopter rescue pilot. 

In 1973 Hering was a Minuteman missile crewman -- one of the guys who turns the key to launch an ICBM. During a training session he asked a simple question: "How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?"
Hering's story has been told and retold several times. First in a Harper's article in 1978. Then on Slate in 2011. Then again in the Washington Post last August.

This question is particularly relevant today considering that an angry man-child is currently sitting in the Oval Office threatening to start a nuclear war with another angry man-child sitting in a Pyongyang bunker in constant fear of being assassinated by the CIA.

Richard Nixon was president in 1973, and his sanity was frequently in question. This was partly intentional because of his "Madman Theory:" by acting irrational and volatile he would engender fear that he would do something crazy. But by 1973 the Watergate story was coming out, and stories of Nixon's true behavior proved he actually was unbalanced. And a crook.

For asking whether there was any guarantee that the president was sane, Hering was discharged from the military. He never got an answer. He became a truck driver.

Now, it's easy to see why the Air Force doesn't want launch officers second-guessing their orders: without obedience to orders the military hierarchy collapses.

But in the Nuremberg trials after WWII Nazi soldiers were convicted of war crimes, even though they were "just following orders" when they incinerated millions of innocent civilians in concentration camps. Nuremberg established several legal principles, including:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Since Hering could be held responsible for crimes against humanity if he incinerated millions of innocent civilians in a nuclear strike on the orders of a madman, it was perfectly reasonable for him to ask for assurances that the president's orders were properly vetted.

In the present case, it is clear that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. Republicans know it, though only a few brave ones who are no longer running for office, like Bob Corker, dare say it. They are counting on Trump's generals -- Mattis, Kelly and McMaster -- to prevent him from doing something catastrophically stupid.

But there's no law that gives those men the authority to override the president. If Trump ordered a nuclear strike and they refused to carry it out they would be technically guilty of treason.

That's why it's more important than ever to be sure that there's a legal and constitutional process in place to prevent nuclear insanity.

First, Congress should pass legislation to require that everyone in the chain of command is of sound mind and body, including the president, vice president and the generals in the nuclear chain of command.

Second, it should be impossible for the president to launch a nuclear strike in a fit of pique because some third-rate dictator insulted him. It should require a unanimous decision by the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the speaker of the House of Representatives.

The idea that we must be able to launch a full retaliatory strike within minutes and can't involve a small committee is nonsense. Even though Trump still doesn't realize it, we have a nuclear triad that includes ICBMs, strategic bombers (like the ones in Dr. Strangelove), and submarine-launched nuclear missiles. No country can launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the US without fear of retaliation -- especially not North Korea.

This isn't some idle and unfounded fear. There have been two incidents where the world was minutes away from nuclear war: the first was during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962.

The second was in 1983, three weeks after the Soviets shot down KAL flight 007. The Russian nuclear early-warning system detected several missile launches in the United States. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided the warning was a false alarm, and it was: it was just sunlight reflecting off clouds. He most likely stopped a nuclear war single-handedly.

But, like Hering, Petrov was not rewarded. Doing so would have meant the bigwigs in charge of the faulty system had screwed up.

We need men like Hering and Petrov in charge of our nuclear weapons. Not the toddler in the White House Day Care Center.