When U.S. President Donald Trump boarded Marine One yesterday for the short helicopter airlift from the White House to be admitted as a COVID-19 patient at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, he was accompanied by not only his smartphone to stay au courant on Twitter, but something almost as important: the so-called “nuclear football.” The president is always followed by the briefcase and a military aide wherever he goes. It has joined every president when they are away from the White House since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The football is carried to allow the president to be able to launch a nuclear strike at short notice if needed.
It originally got its name from an Eisenhower-era nuclear war plan, code-named ‘Dropkick’, and was created to make sure a nuclear war option was always near the president. There are three of the bags in total, one is with the president, one with the vice president and the other kept safe in the White House.
In a story in today’s Daily Mail from London (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8801071/President-Trump-airlifted-hospital-COVID-treatment-nuclear-football.html), Tom Pyman, a U.K. online news reporter, writes, “The ‘ball carriers’ who look after the cases also carry Beretta pistols and have to shoot anyone who tries to take it.
“Little is made public about what is inside the cases and it regularly changes.
“But a small antenna that pokes out the top of the case means it likely contains a satellite phone.
“There is also a 75-page book that informs the president of his options for a nuclear strike, with another highlighting places he could hide during a nuclear war.
“A ten-page folder on contact details for military leaders and broadcasters sits next to a sealed laminated card known as the Biscuit.
“This looks like a large credit card and shows letters and numbers, with the president having to memorize where on it sits the Gold Code.
“In the event of a nuclear strike, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces will say the code down the phone to the National Military Command Centre in Washington D.C.
“Despite the bags being kept at the White House when the president is in residence, it is widely thought he carries a card with the launch code on him all the time.”
While there is no indication the nuclear football came into play yesterday, one might reasonably expect Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) were perhaps sailing somewhere off Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego, with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) personnel at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Strategic Command, (USSTRATCOM), the global warfighting command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, on high alert.
In the event of a national emergency, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) says, a series of seven different alert conditions (LERTCONs) can be called. The seven LERTCONs are broken down into five defence conditions (DEFCONs) and two emergency conditions (EMERGCONs). Defence readiness conditions (DEFCONs) describe progressive alert postures primarily for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCONs are graduated to match situations of varying military severity, and are numbered 5,4,3,2, and 1 as appropriate. DEFCONs are phased increases in combat readiness. In general terms, these are descriptions of DEFCONs:
EMERGCONs are national level reactions in response to ICBM (missiles in the air) attack. By definition, other forces go to DEFCON 1 during an EMERGCON.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was placed on DEFCON 2 for the first time in history, while the rest of U.S. military commands (with the exception of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe) went on DEFCON 3. On Oct. 22, 1962 SAC responded by establishing Defense Condition Three (DEFCON III), and ordered Boeing B-52 Stratofortress long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bombers on airborne alert. Tension grew and the next day SAC declared DEFCON II, a heightened state of alert, ready to strike targets within the Soviet Union.
Alert conditions and the nuclear football are but two component in what is known as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, which establishes defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in the case of a catastrophic event.
As anyone who watched the fictional series Designated Survivor on ABC or Netflix between 2016 and 2019 probably knows, the real line of presidential succession is, in fact, the vice president, speaker of the House of Representatives, speaker of the Senate, and members of the cabinet in order of precedence, who are all killed when a bomb blows up the Capitol during the president’s state of the union address. All but one that is. Thomas Kirkman (played by Kiefer Sutherland), the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is 11th in line of succession and off-site for the evening as the “designated survivor” for just such contingencies.
Kirkman is rushed by the Secret Service to the White House where they’re met by a D.C. federal appellate judge who swears him in as president in the lobby, and actually gets the oath of office to be repeated by Kirkman correct, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, saying, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States (https://www.imdb.com/video/vi24950809?fbclid=IwAR0Pk-GtUPK0dRe41x4GEMiHjOlJ5e_O8IngEcU5dLT9dKF6KaHujhYFEYk).
On Nov. 23, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.
President Kennedy died a short time later.
Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, and who was riding in a car behind President Kennedy, was sworn in a short time later as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas using a Roman Catholic missal mistakenly taken by Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, as O’Brien supposedly thought the missal was a Bible. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.
As the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, became the only woman in U.S. history to date to have sworn in a United States president (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/on-nov-22-1963-lbj-was-sworn-in-by-judge-sarah-tilghman-hughes-a-federal-judge-and-the-only-woman-in-u-s-history-to-have-sworn-in-a-united-states-president-while-mistakenly-using-a-roman-catholic/), a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States. Wrong book, wrong oath, however. Hughes explained five years later in 1968 that she got the oath wrong, as she mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”
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