I will breathe a lot easier a week from now. This system definitely needs to be reformed. Daniel Ellsberg's recent book The Doomsday Machine supports a lot of

I will breathe a lot easier a week from now. This system definitely needs to be reformed. Daniel Ellsberg's recent book The Doomsday Machine supports a lot of this, but adds that historically, theater military commanders have also had independent launch authority, and as far as he can tell, they still do. (Ellsberg is best known for the Pentagon Papers but his job was actually nuclear strategy. He'd intended to publish documentation on that as well, but thought if he did that first, nobody would even care about the Vietnam stuff. The nuclear papers were lost before he published them.)