Originally Posted by
Hoosier Daddy
It's the stuff of Harrison Ford thrillers, except it may have happened in real life. Here's a quick guide to an explosive allegation:
What happened?A new memoir by General Hugh Shelton, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that in 2000, an aide to President Clinton once misplaced a crucial series of codes for accessing the country's nuclear arsenal and managed to hide the mistake for "months." Specifically, Shelton claims the aide lost the "biscuit" — a code name for the notecard used to open the black attache case, known as "the football." The suitcase holds "nuclear codes which the US president would use to authorise the launch of nuclear weapons," and Shelton says that losing them is "a big deal—a gargantuan deal." (Watch an ABC report about the controversy)
How could something like that simply get lost?Although the "movies may show the president wearing these codes around his neck, it's pretty standard that they are safeguarded by one of his aides," writes Shelton. "But that aide sticks with him like glue." There is also a military protocol for checking on the codes, but the Clinton aide seemed to talk his (or her) way around those standard inspections.
How was the situation resolved? When it was time to replace the old codes with new ones, the aide finally confessed what happened, and the president was immediately issued a new "biscuit." Whether the aide suffered repercussions for misplacing the codes is not clear.
What would have happened if the codes had fallen into the wrong hands?The world was probably not in imminent danger. Former Homeland Security advisor Fran Townsend tells CNN that, even if an unathorized person got ahold of the codes, "it is very unlikely that they could execute a launch, because the "biscuit" is "only one part of the launch protocol." Actually launching a nuclear strike involves a "multi-layered system" that includes the aforementioned "football."
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