Keeping a Finger on the Button: Presidential Continuity and the Nuclear Age

Drawing on unmined archives and original interviews, Rebecca Lubot tells the story of how US lawmakers grappled with issues over presidential succession and inability and vice-presidential vacancy and ultimately ratified the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. She argues that nuclear anxiety played a crucial role in the development of the amendment and its aftereffects, showing how politics and culture reflected this anxiety, and multiple administrations intensified it. She also offers solutions to the amendment’s gaps. As the threat of accident, miscalculation, or madness looms, never has a book on the intersection of presidential continuity and the nuclear age been more necessary.

Following the talk, Dr. Lubot will be in conversation with Dr. Mary Mitchell.

Rebecca C. Lubot, Ph.D., M.Sc., is CEO and Founder of Lubot Strategies and has twenty years of experience at international, federal, and state levels in education, energy and renewables, the environment, historic preservation, sustainability, and several other areas. Working at the intersection of policy and politics, she is skilled at strategizing, coalition-building, and garnering support from both sides of the aisle. Drawing on her academic background as an adjunct professor, she applies lessons from the past when advising decision-makers, crafting policy, and putting policy into practice. Her career began as a White House intern in the Domestic Policy Office of the Vice President, where she focused on policy and speechwriting. She served in senior roles on two US congressional campaigns, as a project specialist to a US senator, and as a legislative aide to a New Jersey state senator. Rebecca is currently a visiting associate at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Mary Mitchell, Ph.D., J.D., is an assistant professor in the federated department of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark, and graduate faculty at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work centers on the intersections of science and technology with law and environmental social movements in the nuclear era. She is trained both as a lawyer and as a historian of science and technology. Before earning her Ph.D., she worked in intellectual property management and law and served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Anthony J. Scirica of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Her first book--a sociolegal history of US nuclear weapons blasting in the Marshall Islands--is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

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