You might have noticed that the military ain’t a democracy. There are no checks and balances - even if the president ordered a strike on a country with which we are not at war, there’s nothing anyone could do to stop him. (People have recently written articles on the subject that some searching could turn up.) As mentioned, there’s no legal mechanism that allows anyone to ignore his orders, nor have any military commanders indicated they wouldn’t obey his commands - quite the opposite, in fact. Even the block put in place that prevented Nixon in his darkest hour from launching nuclear strikes in a drunken fit is not in place - and wasn’t official or legal at the time, either.
Which means the president, in one of his fits of idiocy, can indeed trigger a conflict with North Korea that in a matter of minutes would kill orders of magnitude more people than the first Korean War, and we can’t stop him as long as he sits in the White House.
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