Harold Hering

Who is Harold Hering?

Major Harold L. Hering is a former officer in the United States Air Force, who was discharged for questioning the process for launching nuclear missiles.

Hering served in Vietnam in the Air Rescue Service. 21 years into his Air Force career, while serving as a Minuteman missile crewman and expecting a promotion to lieutenant colonel, he posed the following question during training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in late 1973:

"How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?"

The Single Integrated Operational Plan specifies that, when the National Command Authority issues an order to use nuclear weapons, the order will filter down the chain of command. Per the SIOP, decision-making is the responsibility of the NCA, not of officers lower in the chain of command, who are responsible for executing on NCA decisions. To ensure no opportunity for execution by a rogue operator, the two-man rule requires that at each stage, two operators independently verify and agree that the order is valid. In the case of the Minuteman missile, this is done by comparing the authorization code in the launch order against the code in the Sealed Authenticator, a special sealed envelope which holds the code; if both operators agree that the code matches, the launch must be executed. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum claimed Hering's question exposed a flaw in the very foundation of this doctrine: