The Real
Story of the “Football” That Follows the President Everywhere
Take a
peek at the mysterious black briefcase that has accompanied every U.S.
president since John F. Kennedy
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alt="Nuclear Option Football" v:shapes="_x0000_i1025">
From the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the nuclear
"Football." (Jamie Chung)
SMITHSONIAN
MAGAZINE |
OCTOBER 2014
It is
the closest modern-day equivalent of the medieval crown and scepter—a symbol of
supreme authority. Accompanying the commander in chief wherever he goes, the
innocuous-looking briefcase is touted in movies and spy novels as the ultimate
power accessory, a doomsday machine that could destroy the entire world.
Officially
known as the “president’s emergency satchel,” the so-called nuclear
“Football”—portable and hand-carried—is built around a sturdy aluminum frame,
encased in black leather. A retired Football,
emptied of its top-secret inner contents, is currently on display at the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “We were looking for something
that would demonstrate the incredible military power and responsibilities of
the president, and we struck upon this iconic object,” says curator Harry
Rubenstein.
Contrary
to popular belief, the Football does not actually contain a big red button for
launching a nuclear war. Its primary purpose is to confirm the president’s
identity, and it allows him to communicate with the National Military Command
Center in the Pentagon, which monitors worldwide nuclear threats and can order
an instant response.
The Football also provides the commander in chief with a simplified menu of
nuclear strike options—allowing him to decide, for example, whether to destroy
all of America’s enemies in one fell swoop or to limit himself to obliterating
only Moscow or Pyongyang or Beijing.
Although
its origins remain highly classified, the Football can be traced back to the
1962 Cuban missile crisis. Privately, John F. Kennedy believed that nuclear weapons
were, as he put it, “only good for deterring.” He also felt it was “insane that
two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to
bring an end to civilization.” Horrified by the doctrine known as MAD (mutually
assured destruction), JFK ordered locks to be placed on nuclear weapons and
demanded alternatives to the “all or nothing” nuclear war plan.
A
declassified Kennedy memo documents the concerns that led to the invention of
the Football as a system for verifying the identity of the commander in chief.
The president posed the following chilling, but commonsense, questions:
“What
would I say to the Joint War Room to launch an immediate nuclear strike?”
“How
would the person who received my instructions verify them?”
According
to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the Football acquired its
name from an early nuclear war plan code-named “Dropkick.” (“Dropkick” needed a
“football” in order to be put into effect.) The earliest known photograph of a
military aide trailing the president with the telltale black briefcase (a
modified version of a standard Zero-Halliburton model) was taken on May 10,
1963, at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Since
1963, the Football has become a staple of presidential trips, and was even
photographed in Red Square in May 1988, accompanying President Ronald Reagan on
a state visit to the Soviet Union. (Reagan’s Soviet counterpart, Mikhail
Gorbachev, was accompanied by a military aide who was clutching a very similar
device, known in Russian as the chemodanchik, or “little briefcase.”)
A
recurring complaint of presidents and military aides alike has been that the
Football, which currently weighs around 45 pounds, contains too much
documentation. President Jimmy Carter, who had qualified as a nuclear submarine
commander, was aware that he would have only a few minutes to decide how to
respond to a nuclear strike against the United States. Carter ordered that the
war plans be drastically simplified. A former military aide to President Bill
Clinton, Col. Buzz Patterson, would later describe the resulting pared-down set
of choices as akin to a “Denny’s breakfast menu.” “It’s like picking one out of
Column A and two out of Column B,” he told the History Channel.
The
first unclassified reference to the existence of the Football is contained in a
formerly top-secret memorandum from 1965 obtained by the National Security
Archive of George Washington University. Tasked with reducing the weight of the
Football, a senior defense official agreed this was a worthy goal, but added,
“I am sure we can find strong couriers who are capable of carrying an
additional pound or two of paper.”
For the
Football to function as designed, the military aide must be nearby the
commander in chief at all times and the president must be in possession of his
authentication codes. Both elements of the system have failed on occasion.
According to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh
Shelton, Clinton mislaid his laminated code card, nicknamed the “Biscuit,” for
several months in 2000. “This is a big deal, a gargantuan deal,” the general
complained in his 2010 autobiography, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of
an American Warrior.
An even
closer brush with disaster came during the attempted assassination of Reagan in
March 1981. During the chaos that followed the shooting, the military aide was
separated from the president, and did not accompany him to the George
Washington University hospital. In the moments before Reagan was wheeled into
the operating theater, he was stripped of his clothes and other possessions.
The Biscuit was later found abandoned, unceremoniously dumped in a hospital
plastic bag. It seems unlikely that a crown or scepter would have been treated
so cavalierly.
About
Michael Dobbs
Michael
Dobbs is a former Washington Post reporter and foreign correspondent
in Italy and the former Yugoslavia, best known for his Cold War coverage. Dobbs
is the author of the Cold War Trilogy, which includes Six Months in 1945, One Minute to Midnight and Down with Big Brother.
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