“A Dr. Strangelove Situation”: The Twenty-Fifth Amendment in Practice builds on the implications of the amendment’s being ingrained in the Constitution. February 1967, when the amendment was written into the Constitution, signaled a new chapter in the Constitution’s history. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was invoked just seven times between 1967 and 2025. During the first three invocations—all involving Sections 1 and 2 of the amendment—successful unplanned transitions occurred. But these initial invocations reveal complicating gaps and vagaries in the amendment. Any history that traces the times the amendment was invoked also must consider the times it might have been invoked but was not. Sections 3 of the amendment (invoked only four times between 1967 and 2025) was designed to leave the decisions both to surrender and then to retake power in the president’s own hands. In this chapter, examination of the amendment in periods of heightened nuclear anxiety during the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush reveals that, at times, Section 3 was avoided when it arguably should have been invoked. Presidents, in trying to present an image of strength and good health, have not given up power willingly. Section 4 of the amendment has never been invoked due to these same political concerns. Thus, while nuclear anxiety worked to produce the amendment, it was a factor in suppressing invocation of the amendment in practice. Presidents have even taken it upon themselves to find solutions to the succession and inability issue, sometimes stretching the flexible boundaries of the Constitution itself.