President Trump will break one final transition tradition as President-elect Biden takes office: the handoff of the “football,” the briefcase that holds the keys to nuclear war.
Trump’s early morning departure from the White House hours prior to Biden’s inauguration interrupts the process by which one president takes custody of the codes. Yet, there will be no nuclear fumble on Inauguration Day: Trump’s unconventional exit might be eye-catching, but his breach of protocol doesn’t create any substantive interference with the process.
“We’ve been doing presidential nuclear command-and-control for a long, long time now. … There’s all kinds of different contingencies, and so, they’re well prepared for that,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano said. “It’s symbolic as much as anything else.”
The transfer customarily takes place during the inauguration ceremony “at high noon,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney recalled in 2013, when the military aide tasked with carrying the “football” under the outgoing president hands it to his own successor.
“These two guys are standing there in their uniform[s], and, at the right moment, he reaches over and hands it to the newly designated military aide, and he takes it from that moment on,” Cheney said in a Discovery Channel documentary. “The new president is the guy who’s in control of our nuclear assets.”
A military officer was spotted by reporters quickly carrying one of the devices into the Capitol around 10:30 a.m.
It’s an understated moment for the responsibility, which is no less impressive for the fact that no president has had to order a nuclear strike since the end of the Second World War. “When they explain what it represents and the kind of destruction that you’re talking about, it is a very sobering moment,” Trump said in a televised interview in 2017. “It’s very, very scary, in a sense.”
That military aide is under orders to remain close to the president, holding the list of “retaliatory options” provided by the Pentagon and the tools to ensure that the president can communicate the order when away from the White House.
“The strength of the U.S. deterrent is the fact that we do have this very streamlined command-and-control,” Carafano said. “That’s part of the effectiveness of the deterrent.”
Still, the system isn’t wholly immune to human error or presidential forgetfulness. Bill Clinton, in his haste to leave a 1999 NATO summit, left the event without the military aide in the motorcade — a relatively small matter, given that the event was within walking distance of the White House. A second incident unfolded for months in secret, when Clinton actually lost “the biscuit” — the card that contains the codes required to authenticate any order that comes from the president.
“The codes were actually missing for months,” retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Clinton’s second term, wrote in a 2010 memoir. “We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.”
However, that’s not the only one.
“A second ‘football’ is kept close to the vice president, while a backup resides at the White House,” according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Biden is expected to receive one of those alternative “nuclear footballs,” while Trump’s codes will expire.
“The command-and-control is solid enough that there’s not really a credible question about difficulty in the handoff between one president and the next president,” Carafano said. “Think about it practically … procedures have to be in place to seamlessly hand off command-and-control between the president and the vice president at any moment in case the president is incapacitated. So this instantaneous handoff, that’s something that’s built into the system.”
