Lindsay Maizland

Published on Vox.com when I interned with their Foreign team in Summer 2017.

If President Trump wanted to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons, the hard truth is that no one could stop him.

On Thursday, Trump escalated his harsh rhetoric about North Korea by telling reporters that “things will happen to them like they never thought possible” if Pyongyang attacked the US or its Asian allies. The bellicose talk came just days after Trump stunned leaders around the world by promising to hit North Korea with “fire and fury” if it continued to threaten the US.

For its part, North Korea announced plans to fire four ballistic missiles toward the US territory of Guam, which houses 6,000 American troops. Pyongyang often issues such threats without following through, but North Korean missiles are notoriously imprecise, which means there’d be a real chance of one of those missiles landing on Guam. If it did, some form of military confrontation between the US and North Korea might be inevitable.

It’s important to take a deep breath. The North Korean regime isn’t irrational, and the ruling Kim family has spent decades working to guarantee it maintains power. It’s difficult to imagine Kim Jong Un, the current ruler, launching a nuclear missile at the US when he knows the US response would erase his country from the map.

It’s also hard to imagine Trump, for all of his tough talk, actually giving an order that would lead to millions of deaths.

But if he did give the order, the military would be duty-bound to carry it out. Trump, and Trump alone, is vested with the power to order the use of the most destructive weapons the US possesses.

“We have a nuclear monarchy,” said Joe Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a security foundation that tries to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and the author of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late. “Once he gives the command, he cannot be overruled.”

 If Trump did give the command — a very big if — here’s what would happen between the time the president made the decision and the time the missiles started to fly:

1) The president receives word of an incoming attack.

Experts I talked with said it’s unlikely that either North Korea or the United States would turn to nuclear weapons, especially as a first resort. There are other, nonnuclear options that both countries would consider first, such as sending artillery across the Korean border or launching airstrikes.

“Nuclear war is not about to break out, but [Trump’s] language increases the risk of miscalculation,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to public education on arms control. “And when it comes to the Korean Peninsula, when there’s a miscalculation in war, then there’s a possibility of nuclear war.”

That war would begin with Trump receiving word of an imminent North Korean attack.

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