Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Wherever the president goes, to speak to the UN, to go out to dinner, anywhere, a military aid carries a briefcase

that contains everything the commander-in-chief needs to launch a nuclear attack. The power to do so is the presidents alone. If the orders are

issued, if the codes are correct, the soldiers operating the launch machine have no choice

but to fire. Or do they? A man named Harold Herring wondered about that back in 1973.

He was an Air Force major training to be a missileer to launch those nukes, to commence nuclear Armageddon.

Like any good student with a sensitive question,

Herring approached his teacher after class out of earshot from his classmates.

He asked, quote,

How can I know that an order I received to launch my missiles came from a sane president?

He recalled his experience for Radio Lab in 2017.

I assumed that there had to be some sort of check and balance

so that one man couldn't just on a whim

order to launch of nuclear weapons.

Back then, Herring had sufficient reason to be troubled.

During the mid-1970s, President Richard Nixon

was under close watch by advisors

who were concerned that he was literally losing his mind. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger

issued a quiet decree that he be consulted if Nixon gave any, quote, unusual orders. That's

according to Ron Rosenbaum's book about nuclear war, How the End Begins. And

nukes were certainly on the president's mind. While meeting privately with congressmen at the

height of the Watergate hearings, Nixon bragged that, quote, I could leave this room and in 25

...