By: Alex Marban
As the unitary executive theory regains traction, the President’s sole authority over nuclear weapons illustrates how the racialized foundations of national security magnify the existential stakes of concentrated executive power.[1] Executive power reaches its peak in national security matters, as the President’s Article II authority combines the Commander-in-Chief and foreign affairs power with sweeping discretion over domestic and international security affairs.[2] In this realm, Congress’s power is often circumscribed, and courts tend to be deferential to executive branch assertions, which together create a “state of executive exception” to the normal constitutional order.[3] Consequently, the executive’s “absolute authority to launch preventive nuclear strikes whenever desired” has effectively created an autocratic and imperial thermonuclear monarchy.[4]
The executive’s omnipotent nuclear authority is justified through the perceived need for speed and secrecy, rooted in Cold War deterrence logic.[5] The Cold War’s permanent emergency placed the United States on a constant wartime footing, enabling presidents to enter major conflicts without congressional declarations, while accelerating the executive’s centralization of power.[6] This authority became especially concentrated once nuclear deterrence required the ability to launch within minutes, leaving no opportunity for legislative consultation.[7] Meanwhile, the culture of secrecy has deep historical roots, stretching from Roosevelt’s hidden development of the Manhattan Project to the executive’s unilateral interventions in Korea, the Bay of Pigs, and later Grenada and Panama.[8] By then, secrecy had already normalized presidential action under the guise of permanent emergency.[9]
The executive’s institutional framework of speed and secrecy was ineffective at keeping adversaries from acquiring nuclear knowledge but succeeded in keeping Congress and the public in the dark about capabilities, costs, war plans, and accidents.[10] These Cold War justifications had already hollowed out democratic oversight and weakened separation of powers constraints, enabling presidents to opaquely construct extensive intelligence and nuclear bureaucracies accountable largely to the executive alone.[11] This pattern persisted beyond the Cold War with 9/11, as the Bush administration explicitly drew on the emergency powers normalized in the nuclear age to justify expansive surveillance and counterterrorism authorities, treating terrorism as a new iteration of permanent crisis.[12] In doing so, the atomic bomb’s logic of speed, secrecy, and executive unilateralism extended into the War on Terror, as the government breached civil liberties and human rights norms through warrantless surveillance, extraordinary rendition, torture, and indefinite detentions.[13]
Each of these actions were framed as requiring rapid, unreviewable executive action, further entrenching the democratic deficits and institutional imbalances already set in place.[14] Together, these developments culminated in an imperial presidency whose interventionist reach reshaped both international affairs and domestic governance.[15] For instance, the Obama administration infringed on the sovereignty of other nations through drone strikes and periodic ground raids, while also intercepting the private communications of millions of Americans.[16] Yet paradoxically, the very secrecy and unilateralism justified in the name of national security have repeatedly produced groupthink, under-vetted decision-making, diminished credibility, and a pattern of reckless forever wars.[17]
The United States’s existing nuclear policy, posture, and use are inextricably linked to racialized violence and hierarchy, defining who is protected and who is rendered expendable.[18] From uranium mining on Indigenous lands to testing regimes that treated people of color as collateral, the nuclear complex has mundanely distributed its harms along racial lines.[19] For instance, urban planning in the atomic age deliberately positioned predominantly Black cities as “nuclear bait” to shield white suburbs.[20] And the so-called Cold War was “anything but cold,” as more than 2,000 nuclear bombs were detonated—the overwhelming majority on Indigenous lands.[21]
These patterns of slow violence reveal a deeper architecture in which racialized populations—at home and abroad—are imagined as the first and worst victims of nuclear forces, shaping where the United States tests weapons, whom it threatens with first use, and which states it condemns for seeking nuclear capabilities.[22] Given this backdrop, the President’s unilateral authority to launch a nuclear strike is part and parcel of a system already structured by racialized assumptions—one in which insidious secrecy and minimal accountability mix into a self-reinforcing feedback loop.[23]
Now, with the specter of the unitary executive theory looming, whatever semblance of checks within the executive’s nuclear authority could entirely evaporate.[24] While Trump has been labeled as a “stress test” for American democracy, the danger here is inherently structural: presidential nuclear authority already operates against a backdrop of permanent emergency, and the unitary executive theory would simply strip away the last internal restraints.[25] Under this theory, any hesitation or resistance within the nuclear chain of command could be reframed as unconstitutional insubordination.[26] Eliminating these internal constraints within a system already structured by racialized logics heightens the danger that such biases could be transmitted directly into nuclear decision‑making.[27]
If that power over nuclear weapons is interpreted as vesting allauthority in a single President, the consequences are truly endless and jeopardize humanity’s survival.[28] An autocratic or rogue President could become trigger-happy and initiate a global nuclear crisis within minutes in response to perceived internal or external enemies.[29] And because this authority sits atop a racialized and dehumanizing infrastructure, the President’s nuclear capabilities could carry those resentments into an intentional and/or accidental conflict with no meaningful escalation controls.[30] The immediate consequences would be both globally catastrophic and domestically disproportionate, falling hardest on the very communities the nuclear order has long rendered vulnerable.[31] Therefore, if the executive’s already extraordinary nuclear authority were further amplified through the unitary executive theory, it would open a Pandora’s box that could destabilize an already fragile nuclear balance.[32]
[1] See Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Vesting, 74 Stan. L. Rev. 1479 (2022); Van Jackson, The Fascist Nuke Problem, The Duck of Minerva, (Oct. 26, 2023, 14:34 EDT), https://www.duckofminerva.com/2023/10/the-fascist-nuke-problem.html [https://perma.cc/L249-P6AA].
[2] Laura A. Dickinson, Protecting the U.S. National Security State from a Rogue President, 16 Harv. Nat’l Sec. J. 1, 4 (2025).
[3] Id. at 4-5; Rebecca Thorpe, US Empire in the Age of Trump, Class, Race, and Corporate Power. Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 3 (2018), https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol6/iss1/3.
[4] Jeet Heer, Don’t Just Impeach Trump. End the Imperial Presidency, The New Republic, (Aug. 12, 2017), https://newrepublic.com/article/144297/dont-just-impeach-trump-end-imperial-presidency [https://perma.cc/DLQ9-ZXF2].
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] David Marcus, Permanent Emergency: The Bomb and the Democratic Process, Dissent (Aug. 5, 2015), https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/hiroshima-70-anniversary-nuclear-weapons-emergency-democracy/ [https://perma.cc/53QH-G5A8].
[9] Id.
[10] Kennette Benedict, Congress and the Citizenry, Nuclear Age Peace Found. (Feb. 28, 2018), https://www.wagingpeace.org/congress-and-the-citizenry/ [https://perma.cc/K2X5-D8PA].
[11] Marcus, supra note 8.
[12] Id.
[13] Id.
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Id.
[17] Heidi Kitrosser, Congressional Oversight of National Security Activities: Improving Information Funnels, 47 Cardozo L. Rev. 1049, 1066-67 (2007); Harold Hongju Koh, Concentration of Power in the Executive, Dædalus (Fall 2025), https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/daedalus_fa25_04_koh.pdf [https://perma.cc/7TRG-NQ78].
[18] Benjamin Meiches, Dreams of atomic genocide: The bomb, racial violence, and fantasies of annihilation, Review of Int’l Stud. (Apr. 12, 2023).
[19] See Jessica Hurley, INFRASTRUCTURES OF APOCALYPSE (2020).
[20] Id.
[21] Karen Barad, Nuclear Hauntings & Memory Fields, For the Time-Being(s), Apocalyptica (2023), https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/apocalyptica/article/view/24891/19022 [https://perma.cc/82TT-MWU3].
[22] See id.; Joseph Gerson, Deadly Connections: Empire and Nuclear Weapons, in Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (2007); Elaine Scarry, The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture, Boston Rev. (Aug. 5, 2020), https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/elaine-scarry-tk/.
[23] See Susan H. Bitensky, Nuclear Weapons’ Negation of the Rule of Law, 39 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 559 (2021).
[24] See Dickinson, supra note 2.
[25] Id.
[26] See Thomas Homer-Dixon, Luke Kemp, Michael Lawrence, & Megan Shipma, Impact 2024: How Donald Trump’s Reelection Could Amplify Global Inter-systemic Risk, Cascade Institute (Oct. 29, 2024), https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/impact-2024/ [https://perma.cc/R3FT-4BPE].
[27] See Jackson, supra note 1.
[28] See Shugerman, supra note 1; Jacques E. C. Hymans, Comment on Meier and Vieluf’s “Upsetting the Nuclear Order: How the Rise of Nationalist Populism Increases Nuclear Dangers,” The Nonproliferation Rev. (Sept. 2022).
[29] See Hymans, supra note 22.
[30] See Jackson, supra note 1.
[31] See Hurley, supra note 14.
[32] See Thomas Graham Jr., The Role of Nuclear Weapons: Why Biden Should Declare a Policy of No First Use, just security (Sept. 29, 2021), https://www.justsecurity.org/78375/the-role-of-nuclear-weapons-why-biden-should-declare-a-policy-of-no-first-use/ [https://perma.cc/MS87-DSCA].
