Harold Hering's question about nuclear launch orders

Harold Hering was not a protester or a whistleblower. By 1973 he was a career Air Force officer with roughly two decades of service, a combat rescue helicopter pilot with multiple tours in Southeast Asia and decorations including the Distinguished Flying Cross. He had been selected to retrain as a Minuteman missile crew officer, the job of sitting in an underground capsule and, if ordered, turning the keys that launch nuclear missiles.

During that training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, late in 1973, he asked a question. Its most quoted form is short: how could he know that an order to launch came from a sane president?

What he was asking

The question was narrower and more practical than it sounds. Missile crews were trained in elaborate procedures to make sure that a launch order was authentic. Under the two-person rule, two officers must independently verify a launch message, including by checking codes against sealed authenticators, and act together. Those safeguards were built to answer one question very carefully: did this order really come from the National Command Authority, the president at the top?

Hering's question was about something the procedures didn't cover. If the order was authentic, how would a crew officer know it was lawful and sane? Was there any check on the decision itself, as opposed to its authenticity? He wasn't asking for a veto over the president. He was asking what protections existed, so that he could carry out his duty with a clear conscience.

It is worth remembering the timing. Late 1973 was the middle of the Watergate crisis, and questions about President Richard Nixon's state of mind were being discussed openly in Washington. Hering later said his question was general, but it landed in a very particular moment.

What happened to him

The answer Hering got, according to accounts of his case, was that the question was not something a missile officer needed to know. He was pulled out of training. He asked for a reassignment and did not get one he found acceptable. The Air Force then moved to discharge him administratively, on the grounds that he had failed to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership.

Hering challenged the decision before a board of inquiry. As his case has been described since, the Air Force's position was that judging whether a launch order was lawful was beyond what an executing officer needed to know. Hering's reply was that, as a human being, he did need to know. The board recommended his discharge, which The New York Times reported in January 1975, and he left the Air Force that year. He later worked as a long-haul truck driver and then as a counselor.

There is a dispute about one part of the story. In a 2017 Radiolab episode, a retired senior officer's account suggested Hering had hedged about whether he would turn his key. Hering rejected that version. He said he had committed to following orders and would have done so, though with a troubled conscience, because nobody could tell him what checks existed on a president's decision. Readers should weigh both accounts; the official record of the board is the most authoritative source, and it supports the discharge, not a finding that he refused orders.

Why the case was remembered

Hering's case got some press at the time and then faded. It returned to public attention largely through the journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a long piece about it in Harper's in 1978 and came back to it repeatedly, including in a 2011 Slate column and in his book on nuclear weapons, How the End Begins. Rosenbaum argued that the safeguards Hering was trained on concerned the president's identity, not the president's sanity, and that no rule made the two-person check apply to the president's own decision.

The historian Alex Wellerstein, who writes about nuclear secrecy, has pointed to the case as revealing how the military defined "reliability" for nuclear personnel. A reliable officer, in this system, was one who would carry out an authentic order. An officer who asked how to judge the order itself was, by that definition, less reliable.

The question in Congress

For decades the question Hering asked was mostly discussed by historians and arms-control specialists. On November 14, 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing titled "Authority to Order the Use of Nuclear Weapons." Press accounts at the time described it as the first congressional hearing on that specific question in more than 40 years.

The witnesses, including a former commander of U.S. Strategic Command, explained that the military is obliged to follow lawful orders and not unlawful ones, and that legal advice would be part of the process in most scenarios. They also acknowledged that in a fast-moving situation, especially one involving a warning of an incoming attack, the time for deliberation could be very short. Senators from both parties asked versions of Hering's question. No law changed as a result, and proposals since then to add checks on a first use of nuclear weapons have been debated without being enacted.

Supporters of the current arrangement argue that a reliable, fast chain of command is part of what makes deterrence credible, and that adding steps could create doubt in an adversary's mind that the United States would respond. Critics argue that putting the decision in one person's hands, with little time and few checks, is a risk in itself. Both arguments are made by serious people with long experience in nuclear policy.

What makes it a good question

Hering's question had the marks of a very good one. It was specific. It came from someone with a direct stake in the answer. It exposed a gap between what a system was built to do and what people assumed it did. And it was hard to dismiss without engaging it, which may be why the response was to remove the person asking.

It also shows that a good question doesn't always get a good answer, or a fair outcome for the person who asks it. Hering lost the career he had built. Decades later, the question he asked was being put to generals by senators in a public hearing. We cover more questions that changed the course of events in how one question changed history.