Cliff Sims

And actually, I was standing in the West Wing one day with the president's military aide, and I jokingly said, let me hold that thing for a minute.

And to my surprise, he let me.

Are you serious?

So for about five seconds, I held a 45-pound nuclear football at my side.

And so I've experienced what it feels like to hold the nuclear football.

But before anybody freaks out that I, for five seconds, had the fate of the world in my hands, a lot of what's inside the nuclear football remains classified.

But what I can say is there isn't a giant red button

in there that you just crack it open and like boom and we go to nuclear war.

The purpose, first and foremost, is to verify the president's identity.

So everywhere the president goes, he carries with him a little laminated card called the biscuit.

And on the biscuit, there are codes that are his verification codes for his identity.

So in the event where there was an emergency where the nuclear football gets cracked open, the first thing that happens is communications are opened up to the National Military Command Center, and the president verifies his identity with the codes that are on the biscuit.

Then from there, I have heard it described in media as a Waffle House menu of pre-planned nuclear strike options.

So you can imagine a bunch of different options of pre-planned nuclear strike options.

The scariest thing that I've learned about it all is...

One researcher estimated that there may only be a six- to seven-minute window in which the president would have to make a decision about what to do if someone were to have launched a nuclear strike on the United States.

And the scariest of all potential nuclear strikes is what we call a bolt-out-of-the-blue strike, which is there hasn't been anything kind of leading up to this moment at all.

There haven't been rising tensions that led to this moment.

This is just an out-of-nowhere situation.

somebody with nuclear weapons just launches it out of the clear blue sky one day and we're suddenly confronted with there's a nuclear missile flying toward the United States right now.