UPDATED: This may be Fox News' most dangerous lie yet

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On the Fox News Special Report today, host Bret Baier made the following statement:

Pelosi raising the alarm with Joint Chief-of-Staff Chairman Mark Milley about quote "preventing an unhinged President from using the nuclear codes," saying the situation could not be more dangerous. That's despite the fact that a sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.

They told their viewers that Nancy Pelosi's concerns were misplace, and we have nothing worry about, in spite of a mountain of evident to the contrary. 

From the Washington Post today:

There is no legal way to stop Trump from ordering a nuclear strike if he wants to, expert says
By Elizabeth N. Saunders
8 January 2021
...
I asked Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT and a nuclear proliferation and strategy scholar, what this does — and doesn’t — mean. (The content has been lightly edited.)

1. Is there anything Milley can do to prevent the president from “accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike”?

The answer is emphatically no. The president, and the president alone, possesses the sole authority to order a nuclear launch, and no one can legally stop him or her. Despite reports that Pelosi received assurances that there are safeguards in place in the event the president of the United States (POTUS) wants to launch a nuclear weapon, any such meaningful or effective safeguards would be illegal. More...

From Foreign Policy today:

What Could Stop an ‘Unhinged’ U.S. President From Ordering a Nuclear Strike?
Not a lot, it turns out.

By Jack Detsch
8 January 2021
What can the military and Congress do to stop the president from ordering a strike?

Legally speaking, not much, if anything. Neither Pelosi nor Milley is in the chain of command to make the decision over whether to employ nuclear weapons; that authority rests with Trump and the U.S. defense secretary, who would act together in making such a move. While officials such as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear triad, are charged with transmitting orders for the use of those weapons and advise the president on a launch, Trump would not need the agreement of the military or Congress to strike. Asked on Monday by reporters whether he would follow an order from Trump to launch a nuclear weapon against Iran, Stratcom chief Adm. Charles Richard said he would “follow any legal order I am given” and added that the system of nuclear command and control has “served us well for 70 years.”

While experts agree that there’s no way to challenge the president’s authority to order a strike, not everyone is as sure as Richard that it’s a good idea. “The president has sole, unfettered authority to order the use of nuclear weapons with no ‘second vote’ required,” tweeted Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “If you think that’s crazy, I agree with you. But many people being appointed by Biden to national security jobs disagree with us.” More...

From Time today:

Pelosi Wants to Keep Nukes Out of Donald Trump's Hands. There's Nothing She Can Do
By W. J. Hennigan
8 January 2021
... The phone call, which was confirmed by Milley’s office, comes as Pelosi moves to impeach Trump for a second time. “The situation of this unhinged President could not be more dangerous, and we must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy,” she wrote.

The truth is, however, there is nothing to be done: the U.S. President has sole launch authority over the country’s nuclear arsenal. The power has remained with the White House since President Harry Truman ordered dropping atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. More...

And from Vox today:

Trump has the authority to launch nuclear weapons — whether Pelosi likes it or not
By Jennifer Williams and Alex Ward
8 January 2021 
In a letter to House Democrats Friday, Pelosi told her colleagues that she’d just spoken to the Pentagon about ways to prevent an “unstable” President Donald Trump from launching a nuclear weapon in his remaining days in office.

“This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike,” Pelosi wrote.

She later told House Democrats on a call that Milley assured her there are safeguards in place to prevent the president from ordering an illegal nuclear strike, USA Today reported. (A Joint Chiefs spokesperson later confirmed that Milley had spoken with Pelosi: “Speaker Pelosi initiated a call with the Chairman. He answered her questions regarding the process of nuclear command authority.”)

It’s understandable that his critics on the Hill — who were hunkered down in the belly of the Capitol while Trump’s supporters raided their offices Wednesday — would be tempted to snatch the president’s keys to the “red button.”
But the House speaker does not have the authority to try to keep the nuclear codes from Trump. Like it or not, the president of the United States has sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon. More...

I purposely cited these four credible reports from today to show that nothing has been changed for Trump. This has been the truth about what is called the National Command Authority since at least the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962:

Only the president can direct the use of nuclear weapons by U.S. armed forces, through plans like OPLAN 8010-12. The president has unilateral authority as commander-in-chief to order that nuclear weapons be used for any reason at any time.

Unfortunately for us, Donald Trump is no JFK.

Fox News is trying desperately to ward off any attempt to get Trump out of office. They have been a big part of the effort to keep him on even after he was voted out. They know that effort has probably failed, and now they are fighting to avoid impeachment or a 25th Amendment removal. They know Trump's ability to unilaterally launch a nuclear strike in the next 12 days is the single biggest motivator of immediate removal.

So, they lied and said "a sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons." General Milley may be the highest ranking officer in the US military, but he has no role in the military chain of command. Any assurances he might give by saying Trump's order would never be carried out, would depend on military officers disobeying a command from the commander-in-chief, or determining, on their own authority, that the order was illegal, and mutiny. But the National Command Authority is organized, and its officers trained, to carry out a nuclear strike order immediately, and without question.

Fox News doesn't even address what appears to be the general understanding of the question. They never say what could stop him, or who would have to co-sign, they just assert, without proof, that Nancy Pelosi is being ridiculous, and state as fact "that a sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons."

I wish that was true, but it's a big lie.

Remember the struggle between a boomer captain, played by Gene Hackman,  and his XO, play by Denzel Washington, over obeying a launch order in Crimson Tide. In the movie, the sub had received a launch order, but then lost communication. The XO wanted to confirm the order, the captain wanted to proceed with no further confirmation. It took a mutiny, and a gunfight on the sub to stop the captain from launching the nukes, and fortunately, when communications were reestablished, they found that the order had been rescinded, and we had a happy ending.

But if the order hadn't been rescinded, they would have launched the nukes, even the XO agreed.

When you look at the real world situation, the officers on a boomer may be completely unaware of what happened at the Capitol this week. They may not even know what target they are being ordered to nuke. They will only know that the codes matched. That means its a legal order from the President of the United States, and theirs is not to reason why. They will do the one thing they have been trained to do and launch the nukes.

As I said, I cited the four articles above because they reflect the current situation, but this has long been a settled question, documented in a series of tweets I sent out this morning (something I can still do, but Trump can't ☺):

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, can launch a nuclear weapon whenever he wants. There exists no check on this authority. #DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/hmhMxfx8sq

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

JAMES CLAPPER: In a fit of pique, he decides to do something about Kim Jong-un, there's actually very little to stop him.#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/dsNref1Owe

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

"The US president has sole authority to authorise the use of US nuclear weapons."#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNowhttps://t.co/MIDQsreC6K

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

Trump ... with all the authorities ...and nothing left to lose. Among the authorities he’ll retain until his final minutes in office? The awesome and awful power to launch the United States’ nuclear arsenal on command.#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/lufYe3au0P

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

"The president still has the sole authority to launch a nuclear attack,"#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/lEdnotDJvI

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021 

We need Trump gone ASAP. 

Clay Claiborne

UPDATE 9 January 2021: Top Pentagon Officials confirm that Trump is still commander in chief, and can launch nukes, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt reported in the New York Times yesterday:

[S]hort of the cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment or impeaching and convicting the president, it would be unconstitutional to defy legal orders from the commander in chief, experts note.

...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California on Friday took the unprecedented step of asking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about “available precautions” to prevent President Trump from initiating military action abroad or using his sole authority to launch nuclear weapons in the last days of his term.

...

But some Defense Department officials clearly resented being asked to act outside of the legal authority of the 25th Amendment and saw it as more evidence of a broken political system. They said that some political leaders were trying to get the Pentagon to do the work of Congress and cabinet secretaries, who have legal options to remove a president.

Mr. Trump, they noted, is still the commander in chief; unless he is removed, the military is bound to follow his lawful orders. While military officials can refuse to carry out orders they view as illegal — or slow the process by sending those orders for careful legal review — they cannot remove the president from the chain of command. That would amount to a military coup, the officials said.

So while it would be very comforting to believe that someone would stop our unhinged president from nuking the world, nobody in the military command will do that. There are only two legal ways to take the nuclear trigger away from Trump before 20 January 2021, impeachment, or removal via the 25th Ammendment.