If the US Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, it attributes to the President the title of “Commander in Chief”, from which his competence in nuclear matters derives today.
The US president can obviously hold consultations before deciding on a strike. But only he can use the “football”, the “soccer ball”.
Each time Joe Biden moves, a soldier loaded with this heavy black leather briefcase follows him, by helicopter, by plane, by car, even in the elevator.
Along with Air Force One and “The Beast”, the armored Cadillac of the President of the United States, this briefcase is the quintessential attribute of presidential power.
Place Rouge
Since its first appearance during the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “football” has crisscrossed the United States and the world – even passing through Red Square, during the meeting in 1988 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The contents of the suitcase of about twenty kilos, reinforced with steel, is confidential. But, reading various testimonials and press articles, one thing is certain: it does not contain a big red button, rather codes as well as lists of targets and strategies.
To activate the procedure, the president must identify himself with a “cookie”, a code printed on a plastic support the size of a credit card, which he never separates… in theory.
Because history is obviously rich in more or less verified incidents. Jimmy Carter forgot his card in the pocket of a suit sent to the dry cleaners. Or, more dramatically: when Ronald Reagan is hospitalized after an assassination attempt in 1981, the card remains in the effects hastily put aside by medical personnel, before the federal police (FBI) find it.
These codes allow the military staff to know that it is indeed the president who is at the origin of the order.
The command would then be transmitted to a submarine or land launch center, and executed within minutes.
The United States has, according to an inventory of the scientific journal “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists”, 3,708 nuclear warheads, including 1,744 currently deployed.
Guardrail
Nuclear fire never remains without a decision maker. When Joe Biden underwent anesthesia for a medical exam in November 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris was, briefly, the mistress.
The outbursts of Donald Trump – who had boasted on Twitter of having a “bigger nuclear button” than that of North Korea – have obviously revived the debate on this crushing responsibility.
If the president’s order is conceived as indisputable and irreversible, it is not he who, concretely, triggers the nuclear strike. The “chain of command” of which he is the first link is human.
“We think about it a lot,” John Hyten, former head of the US military’s nuclear command center, said in 2017. “If (the order is) illegal, what do you think happens? I say “Mr. President, this is illegal.”
The American Constitution provides an ultimate safeguard with its 25th amendment: in the event of the physical or mental incapacity of the “commander in chief”, he is replaced by the vice-president.
It is necessary, to simplify, that the vice-president and a majority of ministers note the incapacity and inform the legislative power. And the president can challenge it.
This obligatory institutional course contrasts with the rapidity of the nuclear procedure, originally designed to respond to a massive Soviet attack.
Joe Biden inherited nuclear power in a completely new way. Donald Trump having shunned the investiture ceremony, impossible to physically transmit the briefcase and the identification procedure.
The Republican is therefore, according to the American press, left for his residence in Florida with the soldier carrying the “football” and with his “biscuit”. While the elected president was given the same attributes, but still inactive.
Nuclear power changed hands on January 20, 2021 at noon sharp, when Joe Biden became the 46th President of the United States.