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Defcon One
Author: TriSec
Date: 10/23/2010 12:42:45
A half century ago this would have been a disaster. Imagine, if you will, dozens of unknown radar contacts crossing over the North Pole and heading for major North American cities.
Meanwhile, off the coasts, detection equipment is picking up numerous missile launches, and Washington DC in particular is in danger of imminent destruction.
The situation is grave. The President has a monumental decision to make; is this a mistake, or the beginning of WWIII?
A nearby aide brings in "the football"...which is the briefcase full of our nuclear attack orders. Another aide brings in "the biscuit", which is the index card with the daily codes to access the material in the football.
Only the biscuit is missing.
*POOF*. Endgame. Russia "wins".
If the new memoir from former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is to be believed, this scenario actually could have happened.
I don't know where Mr. Shelton stands politically...but perhaps this news broke just two weeks before the election as a sort of October Surprise. Perhaps he's hoping to cast any Democratic President as an incompetent boob that can't be trusted on National Defense.
For my money, though....this seems more like something that would have happened on Bush's watch, whose entire presidency was a series of untrustworthy acts on National Defense, but I digress.
I suppose the bigger takeaway is that if the story is to be believed, the United States was without a nuclear deterrent for months. While the Pentagon was in a panic, the rest of the world never found out, and no global Armageddon took place.
Maybe all those old nukes are just taking up space and sucking up money without serving any real purpose anymore?
Meanwhile, off the coasts, detection equipment is picking up numerous missile launches, and Washington DC in particular is in danger of imminent destruction.
The situation is grave. The President has a monumental decision to make; is this a mistake, or the beginning of WWIII?
A nearby aide brings in "the football"...which is the briefcase full of our nuclear attack orders. Another aide brings in "the biscuit", which is the index card with the daily codes to access the material in the football.
Only the biscuit is missing.
*POOF*. Endgame. Russia "wins".
If the new memoir from former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is to be believed, this scenario actually could have happened.
WASHINGTON — Special codes that allow the US president to order a nuclear attack went missing "for months" during Bill Clinton's time at the White House, his former top military officer says in a memoir.
The nuclear authorization codes, known as the "biscuit," are supposed to remain close to the US president at all times and are safeguarded by one of his aides.
"At one point during the Clinton administration -- and until this day, to my knowledge this has never been released -- the codes were actually missing for months," former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton wrote in his newly-published memoir, "Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior."
"This is a big deal -- a gargantuan deal -- and we dodged a silver bullet."
The aide assigned the sensitive job of keeping the "biscuit" managed to lose track of the codes in 2000, the retired general said.
When a colleague from the Pentagon came to the White House to confirm the codes as part of a monthly routine procedure, the aide put him off, saying Clinton had the codes and was busy with an urgent meeting.
"This comedy of errors went on, without President Clinton's knowledge I'm sure," Shelton said, until it was time to replace the codes with a new set, which is done every four months.
"At this point we learned that the aide had no idea where the old ones were, because they had been missing for months.
"The president never did have them, but he assumed, I'm sure, that the aide had them like he was supposed to," he added.
When he learned of the disaster, Shelton rushed to the offices of then-defense secretary William Cohen, saying: "you are not going to believe this."
Procedures were changed after the incident and fears that the slip-up would find its way on to the front page never materialized.
I don't know where Mr. Shelton stands politically...but perhaps this news broke just two weeks before the election as a sort of October Surprise. Perhaps he's hoping to cast any Democratic President as an incompetent boob that can't be trusted on National Defense.
For my money, though....this seems more like something that would have happened on Bush's watch, whose entire presidency was a series of untrustworthy acts on National Defense, but I digress.
I suppose the bigger takeaway is that if the story is to be believed, the United States was without a nuclear deterrent for months. While the Pentagon was in a panic, the rest of the world never found out, and no global Armageddon took place.
Maybe all those old nukes are just taking up space and sucking up money without serving any real purpose anymore?
