“Hmmm, I Wonder if I left those codes at Mickey D’s”

TOWARDS the end of the Clinton administration the US would have been unable to launch an instant nuclear strike because the President had lost the secret codes.

The extraordinary lapse is described in a book by General Hugh Shelton, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirming an earlier account that was dismissed at the time as too outlandish to be credible. Without the codes it would have been impossible to begin the launch sequence for a retaliatory or pre-emptive nuclear strike, an officer formerly in charge of the President’s “nuclear football” told The Times yesterday. “The codes were actually missing for months. This is a big deal – a gargantuan deal,” General Shelton writes in Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

In what the general describes as a comedy of errors, a Pentagon aide assigned to visit the White House to check on the code card every month was twice rebuffed with the explanation that the President was not to be disturbed. When the time came to replace one set of codes with another, “we learnt that the aide had no idea where the old ones were because they had been missing for months”, the general writes.

According to General Shelton’s account, the episode took place during 2000. However, Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a retired air force colonel who was assigned to carry the “nuclear football” for Mr Clinton until late 1998 and who first reported the loss of the codes, said that he discovered they were missing on January 21, 1998. “When I asked President Clinton at the time when he recalled last seeing the codes, he said he didn’t know,” Colonel Patterson said.

“I said, ‘Days?’ He said, ‘I don’t know’. Weeks? ‘Possibly’. Months? ‘Possibly’.”

Mr Clinton normally kept the codes, printed on a laminated piece of card, “rubber-banded to his credit cards” in a trouser pocket, Colonel Patterson said.