Once filled with the necessary equipment and documents, each football weighs approximately 45 pounds. The Utah company Zero Halliburton manufactures the footballs, which are made from a modified aluminum briefcase and wrapped in black leather. Senator Ed Markey also introduced a bill to Congress entitled “No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea,” but it remains unlikely to pass in the near future. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing to consider the requirement of congressional approval for a preemptive nuclear attack. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” In the fall of 2017, the U.S. He doesn’t have to check with the courts.

As former Vice President Dick Cheney explained in 2008, “ could launch a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen. The Secretary of Defense is legally required to comply with the president’s orders, and a strike can only be stopped if multiple people in the chain of command disobey the order. The first bombs will strike their targets within 30 minutes of the president’s command. A “two-man rule” during each step ensures that no single person is ever responsible for launching a nuclear attack. Once the president orders an attack, the nuclear codes are confirmed by the Pentagon and are carried throughout the chain of command, including the bombers, submarines, and missile silos that make up the nuclear triad. The president cannot authorize a strike, however, without the nuclear codes-or Gold Codes-written on a plastic card known as “the biscuit.” Instead, the president can authorize a nuclear attack which is then carried out by the military. It’s like picking one out of Column A and two out of Column B.”Ĭontrary to popular belief, the football does not contain a nuclear button nor can the president launch a strike directly from the briefcase. Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a military aide to President Bill Clinton, explained that the resulting list was similar to a “Denny’s breakfast menu. President Jimmy Carter, however, found the retaliatory options inside the football overly complicated, so he ordered the creation of a simplified set of war plans. The Black Book containing the retaliatory options, a book listing classified site locations, a manila folder with eight or ten pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Broadcast System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes.

Once opened, the football can be used to verify the president’s identity, communicate with the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, and provide a list of strike options.īill Gulley, the former director of the White House Military Office, revealed its contents in his 1980 book Breaking Cover: “There are four things in the Football. The football is only active when the president is away from the White House the Situation Room-the secure intelligence center run by the National Security Council where the president can maintain command and control of the United States Armed Forces-is used otherwise. A nuclear war plan at the time was code-named “Dropkick”-a sequence that naturally would require a “football”-hence the briefcase’s nickname. It was first photographed in the hands of a military aide on May 10, 1963, when President Kennedy was on a trip in Massachusetts. “How would the person who received my instructions verify them?” Evidently, he did not receive a satisfactory answer.Īmerican military officials solved this problem by creating a briefcase that would give the president the means to quickly receive information and authorize a nuclear strike. “What would I say to the Joint War Room to launch an immediate nuclear strike?” asked President John F. The American nuclear “football,” officially known as the Presidential Emergency Satchel, first came into use in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Each side ultimately settled on a remarkably similar method: a briefcase that would allow its operator to order a nuclear attack within minutes. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union decided that their respective leaders needed an effective command system in order to maintain a reliable nuclear deterrent.

Nuclear time codes