I think you interpreted the parent as saying the president might be drunk & order an unprompted nuclear attack.
The parent was really saying that the president might need to respond to a nuclear attack at any time, therefore they should always be sober and ready to respond. Essentially, the president is oncall 24/7 for reacting to nuclear threats.
There are some protections though where the presidents orders can be disobeyed, which are mentioned in that Wikipedia article you linked.
> "What if [the president's] mind is deranged, disordered, even damagingly intoxicated? ... Can he launch despite displaying symptoms of imbalance? Is there anything to stop him?" Rosenbaum says that the answer is that launch would indeed be possible: to this day, the nuclear fail-safe protocols for executing commands are entirely concerned with the president's identity, not his sanity. The president alone authorizes a nuclear launch and the two-man rule does not apply to him.
Even if they didn't mean that, drunk or not, the US president has the sole authority, both legal and practical, to launch a nuclear strike.
Respectfully, you might want to read something more current on the subject. The excellent book Command and Control [1] is a good place to start.
The "protections" you appear to be alluding to presumably mean the "NCA"'s role in this. That's a term that has no official meaning since 2002 (and before that the president also had the sole authority to order nuclear strikes).
The parent was really saying that the president might need to respond to a nuclear attack at any time, therefore they should always be sober and ready to respond. Essentially, the president is oncall 24/7 for reacting to nuclear threats.
There are some protections though where the presidents orders can be disobeyed, which are mentioned in that Wikipedia article you linked.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hering#Discharge
> "What if [the president's] mind is deranged, disordered, even damagingly intoxicated? ... Can he launch despite displaying symptoms of imbalance? Is there anything to stop him?" Rosenbaum says that the answer is that launch would indeed be possible: to this day, the nuclear fail-safe protocols for executing commands are entirely concerned with the president's identity, not his sanity. The president alone authorizes a nuclear launch and the two-man rule does not apply to him.