John Yoo Breaks the Asshat Scale

A few political blogs have noted John Yoo, the guy who made torture legal for the Bush administration, also has some thoughts about nuclear weapons.

Look at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. … Could Congress tell President Truman that he couldn’t use a nuclear bomb in Japan, even though Truman thought in good faith he was saving millions of Americans and Japanese lives? … My only point is that the government places those decisions in the President, and if the Congress doesn’t like it they can cut off funds for it or they can impeach him.

Any sane review of Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945 will show that Truman recognized that plans to use the device were already in motion, and he in fact was very deliberate about consulting with scientists, the military, State Dept, and Congress before making the heavy decision to drop the bomb. Yes, this is a controversial topic, but let's not suggest that Truman made a unilateral decision based on his executive authority to conduct this action. And in fact, one of the first things Truman did after dropping the bomb was to tell Congress that it was up to them to create an Atomic Energy Commission and to take over responsibility for nuclear weapons.

Although the idea of the president hitting the red button to launch a nuclear strike is popular for movies, the significant impact that such a decision would entail ensures that makes one hope that this is not a unilateral decision, unless Russian nukes are inbound and our government leadership has only minutes to decide whether to retaliate in kind. So I wonder what Professor Yoo thinks about President Ronald Reagan's view on nuclear weapons?

 “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.  The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.  But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” 

President Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union address.

UPDATE: Upon reflection on the issue, I will agree that the president does have authority to use nuclear weapons (see this excellent article at the Arms Control Association), but my point remains that Yoo distorted the discussion about Truman's role - and another point, it was not "millions of American and Japanese lives" at stake from an invasion of the Japanese homeland, but more likely in the low hundreds of thousands. 

UPDATE 2: People are telling me that in fact, the president could, if he wanted, unilaterally start a pre-emptive nuclear war. I would suggest that the ethics of the decision would merit the president consulting with Congress and others. And having nuclear release authority doesn't naturally lead to the executive authority to order torture. Yoo is still an asshole and I think he still distorts the Truman case.

Comments

[ken]

Will some one please take this turd to some undisclosed location and keep him forever before he embarrasses the U.S. anymore.

[Brian]

You seem to be reading more into Yoo's answer than is actually there.

[J.]

Brian, I'm not sure I am. The man is extrapolating from "the president can torture people if he says it's a national wartime priority" to "the president can bomb a village of noncombatants if he wants to" and finally "the president can nuke some nation any time he wants to." It's all in the reading of the executive powers memo that he drafted in 2003.

My point is that Congress could have told President Truman not to use the nuke, as some of the scientists tried to, and that Truman would have listened because that was his style. Yoo deliberately twists the historical analogy without understanding the facts of the case he references. I find that abhorrent.

[NVH]

Isn't this what lawyers are for? Getting around laws or inventing new ones to get things done. Isn't that all they are good for?

I agree with J., but the guy is just doing his job, sort of like the rest of us, we don't have to agree or listen.

[Bernard Finel]

As I pointed out on my blog, we executed Nazis for precisely the crime of committing massacres as reprisals... And yet, here is Yoo, blandly asserting that it would be lawful for the President to do so. A problem with Yoo is that he's just ignorant.

[Trev]

...but wouldn't an order to nuke someone have to be in some kind of threat/defence situation? Its one thing to nuke somewhere in Iran or a gigantic Sharktopus, it would be something else to call a strike on Fiji or Tonga.

[Mark]

You really need to state that it was BGen Leslie Groves who not only pushed for the Bomb to be used, but also picked the targets.

A bigger problem is this; Nuking Japan wasn't the "knockout blow" that ended the war. It was more of the straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back. Japan and the following happen to it before Hirohito finally surrendered...

1. It's ally, Germany, had surrendered in early May.
2. The US Submarine campaign did to Japan what the German U-boat fleet could have only dreamed of doing to Great Britain.
3. The USSR had finally entered the war against Japan and began steam-rolling the Japanese army in China.
4. Months of horrendous fire-bombings had already occured.
5. Army morale was low and a large number of soldiers surrendered rather then fight to the death on Okinawa.
6. The existance of the Japanese Navy as a fighting force ended during the naval Battle of Okinawa.

And even then a few Generals tried to stop the Emperor from surrendering. If they had succeeded (and the butler hadn't been able to smuggle the taped anouncement out of the palace) then the Atomic Bombings would have been for not and the Allies would still have had to invade the Japanese Mainland.

But don't tell the Air Force, it would get in the way of a good story.

[James Brown]

I too consider that Yoo is an asshat, but. . .

You have to figure that in the battle for Okinawa, that there were over 10,000 American killed, roughly 100,000 Japanese killed and roughly 100,000 Okinawans killed. Figure the Okinawan poulation at the time was less than half a million. When I was stationed in Okinawa, the Okinawans still remembered the devastation brought to their island some 60 years before.

If the same story had played out on the Japanese mainland, then there likely would have been millions of Japanese dead, I figure American soldiers killed would have been in the low hundreds of thousands.

[anon]

You need to recognize the difference between "consultation" and "requirement." The President does not need anyone's permission to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. He may choose to consult with and seek advice from scientists, military leaders, or Congress, but he doesn't have to. And its extremely unlikely that, in the circumstances when we might be in a dire crisis and need to use them, he'd actually stop and ask Congress to approve their use after a debate of a few weeks.

Hate to say it (because I hate the guy), but Yoo is right on this. Not because of his views on executive power, but because the President is the Commander in Chief, and, thus, gets to make military command decisions.

[J.]

I take your point, anon, on "consultation" and "requirement." But Yoo picked this example as a way to suggest that presidential authorization of torture is equally valid, which I think is abusing the discussion about nuclear weapons authorities.

[ry]

J, I think you're waaaaaaaay missing Yoo's point: that may be how Truman operated(massive consultation), but he wasn't CONSTRAINED by law to do so.

Big difference, no?

Eisenhower sure didn't given how he used nuclear blackmail more than once against PRC while in office, which would've put Congress in full panic mode.

You wanna throw Ike in jail?
--
Yoo operates with the Unitary President model.(See Eisenhower example above) We've seen other forms of it before on other issues(few argued this as EBBBBIIIILLLLLL when Nixon used this option to tie federal funding for things like roads to other policy iniatives, based on his being President making it legal to do, with a SCOTUS case backing it up, or when Clinton followed suit for his plans), and will after Yoo is dead and gone.

Don't like it? Fine. I'm not partial to the Living Constitution model. Got over it. It's a competing theory. Little more. It's got scads of legal documentation to back it up, and you'll find hordes of lawyer types who hate it(G. Greenwald being just one example), just as you find with LC having scholars sneering at it.

Personally? I think we need to find the reset button, like for the old Atari 2600. There's so many hacks and conditional rules that've been added onto this(the US gov't) that it doesn't make sense anymore. And, no, that's not teabaggerism. It's 'toss all the incumbents out'-ism.