This is the script for my video posted on September 21, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
If a nuclear missile launched toward the US, it would take 20-30 minutes from an infrared satellite’s first detection to the retaliatory missiles leaving their silos. The president’s actual decision window is compressed to around six minutes, within which they must decide whether the attack is legitimate and how to respond, effectively choosing whether to end the world. But how do these nuclear launch procedures vary from country to country, and what do they reveal?
The US sequence is the best documented, thanks to declassified Cold War records and insight from insiders, so let's start there. Warning is designed to come from two physically independent sensor types, so that one bad reading can't start a war. Infrared satellites detect the launch within about a minute, and ground-based radars then confirm it in midflight.
This kicks off a ladder of conference calls, each one designed to filter out anomalies before escalating. Duty officers at the National Military Command Center, or NMCC, work with NORAD to decide whether what they're seeing is real. If it is, it goes up to a Missile Attack Conference with the president, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the commanders of NORAD and Strategic Command. In consultation with people whose entire job revolves around this exact scenario, the president has to rapidly make a decision.
In photos of a US president, you might notice a military officer carrying a leather satchel. That's the nuclear football, and it holds a decision handbook of retaliatory options, a booklet of continuity of government sites, and emergency communications gear. What it doesn't hold is a button or the nuclear codes. The president carries those separately on a laminated card called the biscuit. To make an order, the NMCC issues a challenge, and the president reads back the matching code to prove who he is.
A cell inside the NMCC exists almost exclusively to translate the president's decision, whatever it is, into a formatted launch order. These Emergency Action Messages, or EAMs, are cryptographically authenticated bursts of typically around 30 characters, and they specify which war plan to execute, when, and the codes crews need to unlock their weapons.
They go out over a vast array of redundant channels, some dating to the 1960s, from ordinary internet infrastructure to low-frequency comms that penetrate seawater to reach submarines, to satellite and airborne relays.
A message will reach every leg of the nuclear triad, from bomber units to submarines to land-based ICBMs. The EAM specifies the war plan option, the attack time window, the safe combination codes, and a Sealed Authentication System value that can only be released when the president has authorized it.
Every ten ICBM silos are run by a two-officer crew in a hardened capsule sixty feet underground. Their entire job is to receive the EAM, decode it, open a safe that takes both of their keys, match the code inside against the order to prove it's real, and turn their own keys together.
But one crew can't launch anything alone. Five crews share a squadron, and it takes two of them turning keys to put missiles in the air. That's four officers in two separate locations. Any of the other crews can send a command that suspends the launch, though a second cooperating crew can override that too.
Granted, there are distinct differences between ICBMs and submarine launches, but at a high level this is how it works in the US. Once a missile leaves a silo or a submarine tube, it can't be recalled, retargeted, or destroyed in flight. The bomber leg is the exception. Bombers can be launched as a signal and turned around if the warning turns out to be false, which is a large part of why that leg still exists.
Meanwhile, every other nuclear power would be running its own version of this process. The Russian president has a nuclear briefcase, and it's thought the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff have their own, with authorization prepared between them. The decision is the president's, but execution is distributed, with a backup system called Perimetr designed to guarantee retaliation even if Russian leadership is already dead. I made a separate video about that if you’re interested.
In China, nuclear authority belongs to the chairman of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, or CMC. That's Xi Jinping, who also runs the Party and holds the mostly ceremonial job of president, though those roles haven't always sat with one person. Under the CMC there’s a service called the PLA Rocket Force, which operates the missiles, but the authority to use them stays with the CMC.
China has historically been assessed to store its warheads separately from its missiles, which deliberately built delay into any launch. But it has now built 320 new silos across three missile fields, and the Pentagon says it has likely loaded more than a hundred of them. Its early warning network is maturing too. All of this points toward what the Chinese call early warning counterstrike, which is essentially launch-on-warning. In other words, China is removing the obstacles to make launching easier.
The UK's deterrent is submarine-only, though it has announced it will buy US aircraft and rejoin NATO's nuclear mission by the end of the decade. Its procedures diverge from the US more than you'd expect. British missiles have no code locks at all, so the only thing preventing an unauthorized launch is military discipline. And every British submarine carries a handwritten letter from the Prime Minister, sealed in a safe, telling the captain what to do if Britain has already been destroyed.
France, meanwhile, has a unique doctrine of carrying out an “ultimate warning,” basically launching a single pre-strategic cruise missile from a fighter aircraft to signal that a conflict has crossed a threshold, and to give the adversary one last chance to back down before strategic weapons are used. The decision belongs to the president alone, and Macron has spent the past year extending that umbrella over the rest of Europe while insisting that the final call stays exclusively French.
India splits the job in two. A political council chaired by the Prime Minister is the only body that can authorize use, and a second council staffed by advisers passes that decision down to the military command that actually executes it. India has also traditionally kept its warheads separate from its missiles and under civilian control, which is safe but slow. That's starting to change. Analysts now assess that India has put a small number of warheads to sea aboard a submarine.
Pakistan's weapons, meanwhile, are all pointed at India, and it reserves the right to first-use. Analysts suspect that Pakistan delegates its tactical nuclear weapons to lower-level commanders to offset India's conventional superiority, though Pakistan insists control stays centralized, and there’s no public proof either way. What isn't in dispute is that Pakistan’s command structure is being rebuilt right now, with a 2025 constitutional amendment concentrating military authority under a single new office.
The real problem for Pakistan and India is time. Flight times between the two countries are only a few minutes, which means the decision to use a nuclear weapon has to be made faster there than anywhere else on Earth. India's response, by design, doesn't have to come inside that window. The entire logic of no first use is to survive the strike and retaliate afterward, which is exactly what the new submarine leg is for.
North Korea passed a law in 2022 giving Kim Jong-un sole authority and authorizing nuclear strikes automatically and immediately if his leadership or command and control came under threat. The wording implies a designated successor would order the strike if Kim were killed, and a 2026 constitutional revision formalized that further. Nearly everything else about their procedures is unknown.
Finally, Israel's arsenal is an open secret, estimated at around ninety warheads with the Prime Minister assessed to hold the launch decision. But Israel has never confirmed any of it, so every detail is an informed guess rather than a fact.
But as you can see, doctrine is revealed by a country’s nuclear architecture. The procedures may be classified, but what a country builds tells you how it would behave in a crisis. China's separated warheads were consistent with its no-first-use policy, and its new infrastructure is changing that. The US says it doesn't rely on launching on warning, but silos on short alert and a six-minute decision window are hard to distinguish from a force that does.
There are checks against orders that are illegal. A STRATCOM commander testified in 2017 that he would refuse one, and he'd be right to. But in each of these countries, there is no protection at all against an order that is lawful, authorized, and catastrophic. This is the scary part of nuclear operations: every person involved, from presidents to generals to silo crews, is responsible for saving the world.
Keep reading
- Why does the US still need nuclear command aircraft?
- Why does Russia use satellites in strange orbits to watch for nuclear launches?
- Why couldn’t Ukraine keep its nuclear weapons?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.