Apparently the biscuit is a laminated card about the size of a credit card, with a code used to access the football and which the President carries with him at all times. Well, nearly all times. Jimmy Carter's staff sent it in a jacket to the dry cleaners. After the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan his biscuit disappeared while he was being operated on but it turned up in a hospital plastic bag, presumably with other valuables. I wonder if the person who secured the President's belongings had any idea what they had in their hand. But, according to the then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Bill Clinton lost his biscuit completely in 2000 and the codes were missing for months. This was only revealed when a military aide asked the president for the card so it could be updated. Clinton said that he had mislaid it. As this was when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was front page news one can only wonder where it went, though maybe that explains Bill being forgetful. Which made Christopher Andrew comment, in the Sunday Times, that this cast an ironic light on Hillary Clinton's questions about Donald Trump: "Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?" Bill didn't even know where the button was, or more accurately how to open up the box the button is in, to put his finger on it.
I thought I had read that Britain's nuclear weapons would be launched via the Prime Minister using something looking like a old fashioned red telephone, but I'm probably making that up. According to the Daily Mirror the Prime Minister would authorise a secret radio transmission to Britain's nuclear armed submarine at sea. No need for a biscuit then, if the British system depends on people, but perhaps worrying for those who have studied human factors and the unreliable responses that can be obtained from people under severe pressure.
Thereafter the British and American systems are apparently similar, with several people at the receiving end of the launch signal charged with ensuring that the order has indeed been properly given and received. The American process is shown in some detail in the 1995 Gene Hackman film "Crimson Tide". I assumed this was probably mainly movie makers' imagination but I once spoke to a retired senior British officer who had witnessed a test launch of a Trident missile from an American submarine on the "firing range" in the Atlantic. He told me that the film was very accurate as regards the launch sequence and some of the other aspects of the film I had found fanciful. That launch went as planned, unlike the recent British test launch, if we believe what we read. What I hadn't appreciated, but should probably have realised, was that the "firing range" actually crosses most of the Atlantic from east of Newfoundland to somewhere off the coast of west Africa, according to last week's reports.*
But, thanks to the Daily Mirror, we do know what the British nuclear button, which would be used by the weapons officer responsible for actually firing the missile after the above launch approvals had been gone through, looks like. The answer is disconcertingly like a ruggedized version of a rather old and crummy PC gaming device:
It is modelled on a Colt 45. And presumably they practice a lot, or why does it look so "distressed"?
If this wasn't all so serious it would be quite funny.
"He's Got The Nuclear Biscuit, he's not sure how to dunk it", Christopher Andrew, Sunday Times 15 January 2017
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/would-britain-ever-launch-nuclear-8444432, 18 July 2016
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/first-look-red-button-could-7223666, 22 Jan 2016
*PS I got the location of the firing range wrong. It's from off the coast of Florida to the middle of the Atlantic north of the Ascension Islands. There's another in the Pacific from the California coast towards the Marshall Islands.
PPS according to a letter by a retired RN Commodore published in the Sunday Times on 29 January, Britain bought a proportionate share of the United States Trident missile stock. Under the terms of a favourable deal, we can choose from the total stockpile which missiles we load for operational use and for demonstration and shakedown operations. As this is a shared stockpile, we are not in the position of having to check out "our" missiles. The US will therefore "move heaven and earth" to determine and fix the cause of the problem. And we can measure the reliability of the missiles from the total number of test launches (around 100) rather than our own test launches (about a dozen), with the number of failures thought to be one (our recent launch) or possibly 2 (reports say that freely available information in the United States implies an American test launch might have gone wrong in 2011). So at least 98% reliable then. If it's one failure, then a 99% reliability is apparently "much higher than the design intent". Hmm. I'd have gone for a much higher figure myself but I suppose for deterrence to work a 99% chance of a successful launch is probably more than enough.
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