Jimmy Carter is underrated, Thomas Schelling edition

“In the US protocol you have to rehearse the entire process every four months….The French, they never rehearse. And their logic is that if you start rehearsing with the president, people are going to start to know how he thinks and they’re going to be able to influence him.”

But, “When do you think Biden rehearses?” Cerf asks. This is another game he plays with students. “The answer is zero times — he never does it. He always says, ‘I’m going to send someone else instead. Not a good time for me…’ What about Trump? How often do you think Trump did it? And the answer is zero. We said, ‘OK, so let’s not [be] partisan. How often Obama?’ ” He didn’t either, according to Cerf. Presidents, Republican and Democrat, are always far too busy. “The last person to have done it is Carter in the Seventies,”

…The keyholes for this are set 18ft apart on either side of the room, he says. “They have to turn the keys at the same time…The whole arrangement requires two people, so that one serviceman having a bad day cannot decide to blow up the world. “The one thing that they all do at some point is they spend time figuring out how they would do it alone if they needed to,” Cerf says. “They’re not supposed to… [But] they said, ‘Every person in this shift at some point figured out that if they connect the broom to the teapot and hold it like this, they can actually turn the two keys together.’ So they all said, at some point, that they play this mental game of, ‘OK, I can actually start a nuclear war.’ ”

Here is the full Times of London article, gated but very interesting throughout.  Via Jason Dunne.