The president is always accompanied by a military aide carrying a football with launch codes for nuclear weapons. It is argued that the president has almost sole authority to initiate a nuclear attack since the secretary of defense is required to verify the order. The current football dates back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the last being stored in the White House.
About Nuclear football in brief
The president is always accompanied by a military aide carrying a football with launch codes for nuclear weapons. The football is a metal Zero Halliburton briefcase carried in a black leather \”jacket\”. The package weighs around 45 pounds. There are four things in the Football: 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. It is argued that the president has almost sole authority to initiate a nuclear attack since the secretary of defense is required to verify the order, but cannot veto it. The current football dates back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the last being stored in the White House, when the president-elect does not receive the actual nuclear code until after the nuclear briefing. The president takes the oath at noon on the day of his inauguration, and the football is handed to the vice president at 12:30 p.m.
on the afternoon of the day after the inauguration. The last football to be handed to a vice president was given to Richard Nixon, who was inaugurated on January 20, 1961. The total number of nuclear footballs in the U.S. is three, with two allocated to the president, and one to each of the vice presidents and the secretaries of state and defense. There is no way to verify that the person issuing the order is the president and there are no safeguards to check that the order came from a sane president. The operational plan for nuclear strike orders is entirely concerned with the identity of the officer and the authenticity of the order. Notably, Major Harold Hering was discharged from the Air Force in 1973 for asking the question: “How can I know that an order to launch my missiles came from I”?
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This page is based on the article Nuclear football published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 11, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
