Priority #1: Update the NDAA to guarantee exclusively human authority over all employment of nuclear and/or strategic weapons.
We endorse the following recommendation by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) which was led by Dr. Eric Schmidt and the Hon. Robert O. Work. We suggest that a positive course of action would be that Congress could implement an amendment to the NDAA requiring that any software systems related to nuclear warfare or other forms of strategic warfare (e.g. strategic biological warfare) must preserve the President's human authority over nuclear weapons and strategic weapons.
Our scenario modeling efforts (publication forthcoming in 2024) have shown that it is in the security interests of all nations modeled (US, China, Russia) for each nation to codify the above policy proposal into the NDAA or their national equivalent, by amending the NDAA to include a provision prohibiting any allocation of funding whatsoever towards systems that would supplement or partially-replace the President's human control over strategic weapons employment or nuclear weapons employment.
Notably, this security benefit for the nation adopting a law legally guaranteeing exclusive human control exists even if only one nation adopts the policy. This is the opposite of a Prisoner's-Dilemma situation and there is no need to wait for a cooperative agreement between multiple nations. Our scenario wargames show it is in the immediate best interest of the United States to adopt this proposed policy even if the US is the only nation level-headed enough to enact this self-benefiting policy.
Early access to our scenario modeling may be made available upon request.
Priority #2: Update the NDAA to strengthen critical quarterly and annual audits which detect & eliminate cyber vulnerabilities of nuclear command & control systems.
We endorse the following important recommendation by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (a prestigious commission established by Congress in the 2019 NDAA).
We believe the Solarium Commission's policy update proposal above is a critical step to help reduce the possibility that a terrorist group or mentally unstable individual could use cyberattacks to trick the nuclear-armed great powers into fighting one another. This threat type is called Catalytic Nuclear Escalation and is detailed in the 2021 journal article below: