The President and the Bomb is an overarching research endeavor into the question of whose finger should be on the metaphorical button: how should nuclear use authority operate? In the United States the nuclear use power has been held exclusively by the person of the president since August 1945.
The President and the Bomb seeks to look at the evolving history of these policies in the context of not only the United States, but other nations as well. It seeks to show that there is actually sufficient information available for unclassified analysts to discuss these topics in some detail, and to contemplate various legal and policy changes that might lead to less risk of an ill-advised nuclear use order being issued.
This is an ongoing project, with which I have had several collaborators, including Avner Cohen of the Monterey Institute for International Studies, and Benoît Pelopidas of the Nuclear Knowledges Project at SciencesPo. A pilot project funded by the Ploughshares Fund resulted in a workshop at the Stevens Institute of Technology featuring contributions and discussions from Bruce Blair, William Burr, Daniel Ellsberg, Lisbeth Gronlund, Stephen I. Schwartz, Nina Tannenwald, Amy Woolf, among others.
Funding for a pilot stage of this project (2018-2019) was provided by the Ploughshares Fund. Among other things, this was used to host aworkshop at the Stevens Institute of Technology featuring contributions and discussions from Bruce Blair, William Burr, Daniel Ellsberg, Lisbeth Gronlund, Stephen I. Schwartz, Nina Tannenwald, Amy Woolf, among others. Current work on this project is being funded (2021-2022) by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This work is actively in development and there will be several major project outputs (including a website and document database, as well as a major scholarly work) in 2022.
Some of the output of this research work so far includes:
- “The Kyoto Misconception: What Truman Knew, and Didn’t Know, About Hiroshima,” in Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry, eds., The Age of Hiroshima (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020).
- (with Avner Cohen), “If Trump wants to use nuclear weapons, whether it’s ‘legal’ won’t matter,” Washington Post (22 November 2017).
- “No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design.” Washington Post (4 December 2016), B1.
- “NC3 Decision Making: Individual Versus Group Process,” Nautilus Institute, Special Reports (August 2019).