'Then What Happens?': Congress Questions the President's Authority to Wage Nuclear War

The Harvard law professor Roger Fisher once proposed placing nuclear codes in a capsule and implanting that capsule in the chest of a presidential aide (“George”) who always carries a butcher knife, so that the only way for the American president to nuke millions of faraway people is to kill one innocent human being with his own hands.

On Tuesday, for the first time in , a congressional foreign-affairs committee held to examine who in the U.S. government has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. Here’s what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed: Not only is there no George and no butcher knife, but there’s not much standing in the way of a commander in chief determined to fire nuclear weapons. It was a raw, existential exercise in something that has become routine in Washington since Donald