5min chapter

Hidden Forces cover image

Risks of Nuclear War & the Escalation Ladder | Jon Wolfsthal

Hidden Forces

CHAPTER

The Nuclear Button

The president is given a small laminated card called the biscuit. It's unique every day, and in that is a numeric identifier. If he wanted to order nuclear strike, he would have to crack that open and pull out the card. He would then be able to read that number to somebody at the pentagon nuclear command center. An i could be launched within five minutes or it might take as long as a couple of hours depending on whether we had a whole field of c b ms for example. So there's no button, there's no special phone,. There's no fancy gismo where the president has a retinal scan or finger prints - just an old school elementary school system

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