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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's President's Day. Fun fact about the president, he's got this second shadow, a military officer who follows him around at all times with instructions on how to eviscerate the planet with nuclear weapons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wherever the president goes, so goes this person with this atomic briefcase. Except the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Last night, Jonathan Swan broke a story for Axios about the president's November visit to China.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to his sources, when the military aide with that briefcase tried to enter the Great Hall with the president, several Chinese security officials blocked his entry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: John Kelly, chief of staff, told the military aide to keep walking in, follow the president. Chinese security grabbed Kelly, and the Secret Service ended up tackling a Chinese security guard to the ground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In that moment, the United States nuclear plans almost fell into the hands of some random security guards. And it turns out, that might not even be the scariest thing about our nuclear system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some people say there's an even bigger problem at the top. Can the president really order a nuclear attack without any controls? This is Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat.
--:-- Senator Ben Cardin: That question is asked more and more by the American people.
--:-- Senator Ben Cardin: Senator Cardin was speaking at a hearing about the nuclear chain of command, A hearing that was called by Republican Senator Bob Corker because both parties are wondering if the president might be a little trigger happy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Quoting the president in his August interview, North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After that interview, the president said he would destroy North Korea. And then there was that tweet about the big button.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is frightening. The system as it is set up today provides the president with the sole and ultimate authority to use nuclear weapons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what's the system? And what's in that briefcase? How does the president of the United States launch a nuclear weapon? I'm Sean Ramasverm and this is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think people assume, based on the movies, that like, the president goes, give me the button, and then the president hits the button.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: U.S. nuclear arsenal is capable of destroying each of your countries 14 times over. And all at the push of a button. Let's nuke the bastards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not as easy as that. There are some safeguards, but it's not so far off from that being true either.
--:-- Alex Ward: This is Alex Ward. I am the defense and security reporter for the foreign team here at Vox.
--:-- Alex Ward: So let's break this down. Step by step, what is the process of launching a nuclear weapon?
--:-- Alex Ward: Step one, the president decides a nuclear strike is necessary. That actually puts a whole process into motion.
--:-- Alex Ward: And the process, to be sure, is not, I want to launch a bomb today. It hits a button, bomb launches. There is no button.
--:-- Alex Ward: What we do have is the nuclear football. The nuclear football. The football is literally like an aluminum 45-pound briefcase that's leather clad.
--:-- Alex Ward: This is the thing that apparently caused the whole skirmish in China, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and this is carried by a member of the U.S. military who's always by the president's side.
--:-- Alex Ward: Step two, a U.S. military officer opens the football. Within it is basically like a menu of, do you want to strike Moscow today? Do you want to strike Beijing? Do you want to strike Pyongyang?
--:-- Alex Ward: When you open it, does it look like this? Like I'm looking at a mixer right here with all these doodads and screens. There's flashing buttons. Is it that kind of thing?
--:-- Alex Ward: It's just full of papers that have instructions for the president on what he wants to do.
--:-- Alex Ward: At some point, he's going to have to make a phone call. But this is not like a high-tech, super sophisticated system that he hits a couple of buttons or switches a couple of keys and things start flying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we know why it's called a football?
--:-- Alex Ward: So it comes from a former nuclear plan called Dropkick. And what do you dropkick? A football.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Step three, Trump talks with military and civilian advisors.
--:-- Alex Ward: So what he does is he calls the National Military Command Center, which is basically the war room inside the Pentagon.
--:-- Alex Ward: Technically, Trump only has to talk to one person, the director of that office. And Trump would basically say I want to hit X target with X weaponry.
--:-- Alex Ward: Okay, that said it widely believed that the president would take an extra couple of seconds to talk to a couple of other people. One would at least be the commander of U Strategic Command.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I would assume, though, Trump would also want to talk to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joe Dunford, but he doesn't have to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He really only has to decide, I'm doing this thing. And again, all of this, what we talked about, takes like a couple of minutes, tops.
--:-- Alex Ward: Because we're still at just step three, which was decision, football, talk to advisors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Step four, the president gives the official order to strike.
--:-- Alex Ward: Okay. We've talked about the football. Yep. Now we're going to talk about the biscuit. The biscuit?
--:-- Alex Ward: The biscuit is, and I'm not joking, our entire system basically depends upon this, a laminated piece of paper.
--:-- Alex Ward: No. That the president has to have at all times with verification codes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is like when I log into Gmail and it's like, what's the two-step verification? Yeah, but it's like almost less than that.
--:-- Alex Ward: Great. There's like a military code. It's like Echo Bravo or Bravo Charlie or whatever it may be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, yeah. And that's supposed to be the code that the military center, right, that would go and give all the orders, knows, oh, this is the president calling and not like some imposter.
--:-- Alex Ward: Okay. So this is a glossy piece of paper called a biscuit. The biscuit. The biscuit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Step five, the crews prepare the attack. And that's our nuclear triad. So you've got planes in the sky. You've got ships, and actually ships, but really like submarines.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you've got the land-based missiles, and they're all over the country in places like Montana and Wyoming, et cetera, et cetera.
--:-- Alex Ward: Step six, missiles fly towards the enemy. Step six, the missiles fly. And then we'll see if they hit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Again, this whole process would take probably a couple of minutes, Tom.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have a nuclear monarchy in the U.S., so it's completely dependent upon the president's feelings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then just the logistics of, like, is the football near the president and is the card in his pocket? That's the system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It strikes me as sort of inexplicable that at the same time they're running these drills and surely maintaining these systems, there haven't been like real updates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, these are the most lethal weapons the world has ever known, and yet the president's carrying around a piece of laminated paper that he could lose at any moment?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's how it works? That's how it's worked for decades.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This whole process sounds dusty as fuck. Like, are they ever going to update any of this stuff?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's sort of one of the questions, right? Is that, like, will the White House decide to do it? Does it need congressional authorization?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We just haven't touched this question because we haven't needed to for a really, really long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Congress can barely just fund the government. Right. Our militaries can barely run itself at this point for multiple reasons that are also Congress's problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, like, this is not a top priority. And I don't think it will be anytime soon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, with such a dusty system, has anyone ever dropped the ball?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Carter was rumored to have lost the biscuit in his dry cleaning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Clinton just lost it for months and told nobody.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wait, how do you keep a laminated piece of paper in your dry paper? Like when he probably had it in his blazer pocket and just handed it away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, it's small. I'm thinking of like an eight and a half by 11. No, it's like a very, it fits in your pocket.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, it's like a business card sized piece of paper.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Reagan in 1981, when he got shot in the assassination attempt, he was taken to George Washington University Hospital and the doctors ripped his clothes off and in the clothes was the biscuit and it was lost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and they found it like in a plastic bag in the hospital much later. And the FBI held it as evidence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president's supposed to have it at all times. This is like human folly at its best.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. It's completely dependent upon one, at this point, man, just to have this thing just in case.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if it's not there, then the system doesn't work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So like, let's say Trump has lost it. North Korea is attacking America. It's possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump will be like, I don't know where it is and I can't respond in kind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how close have we actually gotten?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the stories that like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the latest Zbigniew Brzezinski now, who was Carter's national security advisor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was famously woken up one morning. He was called and they're like, we see missiles flying at the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he had – he like legally I think it was like three minutes before he had to call Carter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. And in the time he's like deciding whether this is a mistake, whether it's a blip, are we catching the wrong thing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He ultimately decides it's a mistake and he goes back to bed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was right. There weren't nuclear weapons launched at us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But imagine what if he had decided otherwise, right? He could have said, the Soviets are doing it. Right. We're launching back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's going to tell Carter about it. And what's Carter going to do at like four in the morning, whenever it was?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If his national security advisor is like, I know why you were sleeping. We were under attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's like, all right, game on, you know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's a possibility.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, he's going to do nothing because he lost the biscuit. Oh, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If he lost it, that's true. If he didn't have the biscuit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Classic Carter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But seriously, there are points in this system where people can stand up to the president, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is where it gets really, really tricky.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean the reason to talk to advisors is for them to say this is not a good idea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or and this is when we start to get into some real gray area the military advisors or civilian advisors could think that the attack order is illegal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And here's what I mean by that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's possible that, let's say, Trump wakes up tomorrow and goes, I'm doing it, right? But the U.S. isn't under attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then what's the point of sending a nuclear weapon?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some military officers could say, that is an illegal strike, Mr. President, and we cannot carry that out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: because military officers are duty-bound to, one, follow the commander-in-chief, but also the law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: John Hyten said at the Halifax Forum last year that if the president gave me an illegal order, I would push back and say, Mr. President, that was illegal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then what? Trump could fire him? On the spot. On the spot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And keep replacing him with people until someone carries out his order. That is possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up after the break, someone in this process has to have a button, right? We found that person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've established that the president doesn't have a real button. But somebody does, right? Who is that person?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Bruce Blair. Bruce is a researcher at Princeton who's really into nukes.
--:-- Bruce Blair: And at some point in my early life was responsible for firing up to 50 long-range ballistic missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You mean like test missiles?
--:-- Bruce Blair: Well, I was in an underground launch control center in Montana, and my job was to carry out a launch checklist that took about one minute.
--:-- Bruce Blair: Our job was to wait for the actual order to fire. But of course, that order never came or we wouldn't be here right now having this conversation probably.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, good. So the president tweeted about being the guy with the finger on the very big button, which we've established does not actually exist.
--:-- Bruce Blair: You were the person sitting next to the button with the codes, with the keys, with the safe.
--:-- Bruce Blair: I sure was.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a part of the process where you just pick up the phone and call someone and go like, hey, are we sure?
--:-- Bruce Blair: Nope. There's nothing in the checklist.
--:-- Bruce Blair: I think of it as a rote enactment of a prepared script.
--:-- Bruce Blair: And if missiles are streaking toward the United States at four miles per second, there's very little time to ponder the cosmos.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you see sort of obvious blind spots and maybe inefficiencies? Does it have that?
--:-- Bruce Blair: The area where the safeguards are the loosest and, in fact, virtually non-existent is at the top of the chain of command at the level of the U.S. president who has essentially carte blanche authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
--:-- Bruce Blair: It's a system that gives too much authority to a president who may be behaving irrationally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it sounds like the issue, the main issue is that there's this lack of safeguards at the top.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if we wanted as a country to give the president less power in all of this, how would we actually do that?
--:-- Bruce Blair: So not too many people are calling for fundamental change to the way the system works now when we're under attack.
--:-- Bruce Blair: Where people are weighing in with fresh ideas is the situation in which a president may initiate the use of nuclear weapons without apparent cause.
--:-- Bruce Blair: A president going off the deep end, the secretary of defense should be in the chain of command.
--:-- Bruce Blair: Maybe have the Congress responsible for approving the first use of nuclear weapons by declaring war.
--:-- Bruce Blair: We want to be sure that an order from the president would be considered a legal order.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is that insane power and sort of responsibility feel like?
--:-- Bruce Blair: Well, even when you're 24 or 5, the power to fire up to 50 missiles each of which had a huge nuclear weapon, it's awesome. And it's scary.
--:-- Bruce Blair: You cannot make a single mistake. If you, for example, were to enter the wrong number into your launch control center computer during that one minute launch checklist that you're carrying out, it could spell the difference between attacking remote missile silos in Soviet Siberia or destroying Moscow.
--:-- Bruce Blair: You follow the checklist that kind of screens out the emotion and the panic that would otherwise exist.
--:-- Bruce Blair: Where there is a lot of emotion would be if there's a buildup. You go to higher and higher levels of alert.
--:-- Bruce Blair: This was a situation that I was in during the Arab-Israeli war when we received the order to prepare to fire our missiles.
--:-- Bruce Blair: And that meant having the launch keys in our grubby little paws and strapped into our chairs and ready to rock and roll from the blast wave that would rock our shock absorbers and
--:-- Bruce Blair: And waiting to see whether that launch order came or not for many, many hours, that was truly intense.
--:-- Bruce Blair: Particularly since we didn't really know what was going on in the Middle East.
--:-- Bruce Blair: My crewmate and I would sort of look at each other and say, what the heck is going on here? Are we going to, is this the end? Is this the end?
--:-- Bruce Blair: Were we going to be asked or told to fire these weapons?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's an existential moment in life. Not long forgotten, I'm sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The best part of waking up is escaping your dream about being nuked by North Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's my friend Stephanie Fu singing something she tweeted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stephanie legitimately loses sleep worrying about our propensity for nuclear war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in case she wasn't scared enough, and for all the Stephanies out there, We thought it'd be really fun to just have some more sundry, terrifying nuclear facts.
--:-- Alex Ward: The first one that I always like to point to is January 1961, where a U.S. B-52 bomber broke up over North Carolina and two nuclear weapons that it was carrying dropped and actually hit Earth.
--:-- Alex Ward: What? Yeah. One of the bombs, its parachute went. in that moment, like pins fell out and those pins were needed to like make sure the thing detonated.
--:-- Alex Ward: It didn't detonate. Everyone saved.
--:-- Alex Ward: The second one, the parachute didn't go, hit Earth really hard, but the crash actually broke the mechanism required for the bomb to blow up.
--:-- Alex Ward: Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, what else you got?
--:-- Alex Ward: There was also a case in the Soviet Union where they averted a potential nuclear disaster.
--:-- Alex Ward: So there was a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov.
--:-- Alex Ward: Okay. And on September 26, 1983, While he's on duty, one of the computers warned that five missiles were launched from the United States.
--:-- Alex Ward: He has to make a decision. Is this real or is it not? If it's real, they have to react, right?
--:-- Alex Ward: Sure. So after about five minutes, he decides it's not true. The computers made a mistake.
--:-- Alex Ward: And he admits to his dying day. He says he called it a gut decision. And he says it was a 50-50 call.
--:-- Alex Ward: Wow. Last nuclear fact. One of the codes in order for a nuclear weapon to explode that we would have launched, the code was 0000000.
--:-- Alex Ward: I don't know, it's my email password.
--:-- Alex Ward: There you go. You blow up my spot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alex Ward writes about defense for Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramasverham. I host Today Explained for Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi, Noam Hassenfeld, Bridget McCarthy, Luke Vanderplug, and Afim Shapiro round out the team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our theme music was composed by the benevolent Breakmaster Cylinder, and Noam wrote some jams for this episode, too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This podcast is produced in association with Stitcher, and it's part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Julie Bogan: Sean, it's Julie Bogan, your social media manager.
--:-- Julie Bogan: It's your first show and you better not forget to plug the Twitter account. Today underscore explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the end of the day, you want to commute home listening to a good podcast. And you want to come home and have a good night's sleep on a great mattress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Pro tip, your budget stretches further when you shop in America's neighborhood mattress store.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep.
