Washington, October 22: An ex-US official has revealed that special codes allowing the US president to order a nuclear attack were lost “for months” during Bill Clinton’s term in the White House.
In a newly published memoir, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton said the nuclear authorization codes, known as the “biscuit,” were lost by the aide assigned to keeping the codes in 2001.
“At one point during the Clinton administration — and until this day, to my knowledge this has never been released — the codes were actually missing for months,” the retired officer wrote.
The codes are supposed to remain close to the US president at all times and are safeguarded by one of his aides.
“This is a big deal – a gargantuan deal – and we dodged a silver bullet,” Shelton said in his book titled “Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.”
Without naming the person responsible, Shelton pointed out that the Pentagon had sent an official to the White House to confirm the codes as a monthly routine.
The aide had stalled the colleague, saying that the codes were currently with the president, who was busy with an urgent meeting.
“This comedy of errors went on, without President Clinton’s knowledge I’m sure,” until it was time to replace the codes with a new set, which is done every four months, he wrote.
“At this point we learned that the aide had no idea where the old ones were, because they had been missing for months,” Sheldon added.
The then-defense secretary, William Cohen, was informed of the issue, leading to a change in the procedures.
“You can do whatever you can and think you have an infallible system, but somehow someone always seems to find a way to screw it up,” Sheldon noted.
The story may have been skewed, as another book published in 2003 describes the incident only to name Clinton himself as the main reason the codes went missing.
Retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert Patterson wrote that Clinton, and not an aide, allegedly lost track of the codes.
After sending White House staffers scrambling to find it, Clinton admitted that he couldn’t remember where he’d last seen the biscuit.
Former US president Jimmy Carter had also reportedly once sent the card to the dry cleaners in the pocket of his suit.
—Agencies