Hillary Clinton has fueled a debate over whether her rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, is fit to command America’s atomic forces. “Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis,” she said in her address at the Democratic convention last week. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

This portrayal has become such an issue in the campaign that President Barack Obama was asked about it at a news conference on Thursday, where he echoed Clinton’s concerns. Her charge raises a question: Is there any check on a president’s power to launch nuclear arms that could destroy entire cities or nations?

The short answer is no, though history suggests that in practice, there may be ways to slow down or even derail the decision-making process. No one disputes, however, that the president has an awesome authority.

If the United States appeared to be under nuclear assault, the president would have minutes to decide whether the threat was real, and to fire as many as 925 nuclear warheads with a destructive force greater than 17,000 Hiroshima bombs, according to estimates by Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington.

Full story: http://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/aug/05/clintons-charge-raises-issue-of-checks-on-nuclear/

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