GOP Lawmakers Reveal They Don’t Know How Launching Nukes Works Amid Defense Secretary Health Crisis

Sometimes it takes a crisis to show you how ignorant your elected officials are. In the wake of a crisis around the health of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, some Republican lawmakers have shown just how little they know about how America’s nuclear weapons work.

Austin, who is 70 years old, went to the doctor for an unspecified elective medical procedure on December 22. He went home after the procedure, which remains a mystery, and began to experience pain a few days later. On the night of January 1st, Austin went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and was put in the ICU. He’s out of the ICU but remains in the hospital as of this writing.

Austin and the Pentagon didn’t tell people, including the president, what was going on. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks was on vacation in Puerto Rico when she got the call that she needed to sub in for Austin, but the Pentagon didn’t tell her why. The Pentagon didn’t release a public statement about what was going on until Thursday night, about 15 minutes after it told Congress. It also never informed President Biden. 

That is a highly concerning series of events. Austin’s hospitalization comes at a time when the U.S. is involved in a lot of delicate military matters. Israel’s war on Gaza continues, America is part of a coalition fighting Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, and the U.S. launched a drone strike in Iraq on Thursday night when Austin was in a hospital. But some lawmakers erroneously said it has implications for the U.S.’s ability to respond to nuclear threats. 

"It's not right [that] the DoD leadership failed to notify the White House,"  Don Bacon, a Republican Congressman from Nebraska who sits on the Armed Services Committee, told Axios. "Nuclear command and control is priority number one, and the SECDEF is a key authority in this chain of command," he said. "The confusion here undermines deterrence."

Fellow Armed Services Committee member Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator from Arkansas, echoed this sentiment. “The secretary of defense is the key link in the chain of command between the president and the uniformed military, including the nuclear chain of command, when the weightiest of decisions must be made in minutes,” he said in a statement on his website. “If this report is true, there must be consequences for this shocking breakdown.”

The problem is that the Secretary of Defense isn’t part of the nuclear command chain. The position doesn’t have anything to do with how the president launches nukes. 

“The Secretary of Defense not only isn't a key link in the chain of command, he's not even in the chain of command,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear arms expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism, told Motherboard. “The President can contact the National Military Command Center directly and order from a menu of preplanned operations just as easily as you can order a pizza delivered. The only difference is it would probably take the pizza much longer to be delivered.”

“It is a frequent misperception that the Secrecy of Defense is part of the chain of command for nuclear launch decisions—perhaps because it defies common sense that he is not. But the chain of command for nuclear launch goes straight from the President to the military command center at the Pentagon, which authenticates the order and relays it to the commands and units,” Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Motherboard.

“The President may consult with the Secretary of Defense, and would likely do so in most nuclear launch decisions, but is not required to do so and the Secretary has no formal vote. It irks many that we have a system where one person has sole authority, certainly for decisions where the United States has not been attacked with nuclear weapons or only a few,” Kristensen said. “This became eerily clear during the Trump presidency where even the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff sought to interject himself into the procedure. In all other military matters, the Secretary is formally part of the decision chain and should certainly be so for first use or limited use of nuclear weapons short of a reaction to a large-scale surprise nuclear attack.”

Right now, Austin is still in the hospital, though the Pentagon said he is recovering and has resumed his duties. “Since resuming his duties on Friday evening, the Secretary has received operational updates and has provided necessary guidance to his team,” the DoD said in its most recent public statement on the issue. “He has full access to required secure communications capabilities and continues to monitor DoD's day-to-day operations worldwide.”

Biden reaffirmed his support of Austin and said he wouldn’t accept his resignation if offered.