Obama’s briefcase of nuclear secrets

By David Wood and Agencies

It is a simple transfer of immense power. Today, an unobtrusive military officer carrying a briefcase will follow President George W Bush up to Capitol Hill.

After the inauguration ceremony, he will accompany President Barack Obama back to the White House. Inside the briefcase, known as ‘the football’, are codes to identify and authenticate a presidential order that could launch nuclear weapons and ignite a global holocaust.

Terrorist attacks

Routine to most Americans, perhaps astonishing to much of the world, this peaceful passing of ‘the football’ will propel Obama into a maelstrom.

What awaits the new commander-in-chief is the responsibility of defending the US — and a nasty brew of nuclear-weapons problems that include the threat of terrorist attacks, as well as potential new regional and superpower arms races.

The transfer of nuclear command and control from one US president to another is one of the most important rituals of the inauguration process, but which draws little public attention.

After Obama takes over, a military aide will always be at his beck and call 24 hours a day with the ‘football’.

In the event of an act of war against the United States that would require a nuclear response, the president would turn to the aide and open the briefcase to initiate the protocols that authorise the military nuclear chain of command to act.

The president will enter a personal-identification number (PIN) assigned to him by the National Security Agency (NSA), the service based at Fort Meade, Maryland, responsible for electronic intelligence and cryptography.

Military escort

That PIN allows the president to authenticate himself as the commander-in-chief. The authentication code generated through the PIN proves to military leaders and the men on the nuclear platforms that the order is genuine and the president has activated the launch-authorisation code to let fly the missiles.

The briefcase if so key to State Security that during an emergency, like when Ronald Reagan was shot on March 31, 1981, it was taken to him in hospital by the aide who carried it for him, just in case it was needed.

The president and his military aides rehearse the handover exercise in advance. The president can rely heavily on his ‘football-carrying’ military escort.

"The military aide is specially trained in the launch procedures," says a veteran White House defence official.

Volatile times

Obama inherits the hot briefcase at volatile times. Iran and North Korea are rushing headlong toward building nuclear arsenals. And the main arms-reduction treaty with Russia expires next year.

The risk of nuclear war will grow during the next 20 years, US intelligence officers concluded last month. Surprise, in this realm, is almost a given.

"It is immensely sobering when you are actually confronted with all the responsibility related to nuclear weapons," said Matthew Bunn, a former White House nuclear-weapons adviser, now at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

That will become clear with Obama’s first peek inside the briefcase. The secure phone nestled inside will connect him to the nuclear command centers at the Pentagon, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and ‘Site R’, the bunkered emergency command center near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. Through them, the president can reach the 1,300 US strategic nuclear weapons always on alert.

Inside the case he also will find a notebook listing attack options the president may choose and order.

Previous presidents have found all this hard to absorb.

"The most sober and startling I ever heard," former president Ronald Reagan said of his first briefing on the nuclear options. So disturbing that it helped launch him on a quest to abolish nuclear weapons. Obama has outlined an ambitious plan for tackling many of these issues.

Hair-trigger alert

"Here’s what I will say as president: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons," he said in an October 2, 2007, speech in Chicago. While working toward that long-range goal, he said the United States "will not pursue unilateral disarmament".

But he vowed to reach an agreement with Russia "to take US and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert".

(Adapted from The Baltimore Sun and Agencies)