Donald Trump’s views on nukes may be the scariest thing about his candidacy. But how does Potus launch an attack at a moment’s notice? And what happens when you send the codes to the dry cleaners by mistake...

In a speech in San Diego recently, Hillary Clinton asked: “Do we want his [Donald Trump’s] finger anywhere near the button?” She was doubtful that her Republican rival was really the guy you wanted to unleash America’s arsenal of nuclear warheads which has thousands of times the destructive force of the weapons that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 71 years ago this month.

Certainly, her opponent’s nuclear strategy, if that’s not too strong a word, is nothing if not maverick. “Somebody hits us within Isis, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” Trump asked in March. He was also reported as saying of nuclear weapons: “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” On an interview with MSNBC in March, his interviewer told Trump that nobody wanted to hear that “a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons”. To which Trump replied: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”

This sort of stuff has been too much, for some Republicans. One of them is John Noonan, who worked for many years as a Minuteman III nuclear launch officer under the Wyoming tundra, hoping never to receive a particularly urgent call from presidents Bush or Obama. He is not voting for Trump because he thinks the Republican is too irrational and doesn’t understand nuclear deterrence strategy that, in his view, has spared the world from destruction since 1945. “The very point of nuclear weapons is that they are never used,” wrote Noonan in the LA Times earlier this month. “We have them to dissuade hostile powers from attacking us, and vice versa.

“I sat at my post believing, through both the Bush and Obama administrations, that the president was fundamentally rational and would never ask me to do my terrible duty. Not unless the country was in the direst of national emergencies. With Trump as president, the young men and women who are assigned to our nuclear forces will have no such assurances.”

To be fair, maybe Trump does understand something of the mind-boggling, games-theory-based logic underpinning deterrence strategy. He was asked on CBS in March when should the US use nuclear weapons. “Well, it is an absolute last stance. And, you know, I use the word unpredictable. You want to be unpredictable.” The corollary? If you’re too predictable, then the enemy can get the nuclear jump on you.

In another interview, Trump was asked if he would nuke Europe. “Europe is a big place,” he replied airily. “I’m not going to take cards off the table.”

What Clinton must have known better than most when she made her San Diego speech is that Donald Trump will never get his fingers on the nuclear button. Not because the polls suggest she will trounce him in November, but rather because it is merely a figure of speech. In a 1980s Spitting Image sketch, Ronald Reagan had two buttons at his bedside. One was labelled “nurse”, the other – inadvertently pressed – labelled “nukes”. In reality, there is no such thing as the president’s nuclear button.

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Every US president since John F Kennedy has been equipped with a nuclear biscuit and a nuclear football. It’s what the US president does with them that decides whether the rest of us should plan for tea or armageddon.

The so-called nuclear biscuit is a credit-card-sized piece of plastic containing the codes the president needs to order the launch nuclear weapons. The president is supposed to carry the biscuit at all times, though there are reports that in the 1970s Jimmy Carter inadvertently lost his when a suit was sent to the dry cleaners.

Worse was to happen 20 years later under Bill Clinton’s presidency when, according to General Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, “the codes were actually missing for months”. Shelton wrote in his memoir Without Hesitation: “That’s a big deal – a gargantuan deal.” You think? Indeed, one of Clinton’s former military aides, Lt Col Robert “Buzz” Patterson, recalled that the morning after the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal broke, he asked the president for the card so that he could supply an updated version. The president couldn’t find it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A military aide carries the nuclear football. Photograph: Joshua Roberts / Reuters/Reuters

“He thought he just placed them upstairs,” Patterson wrote in his memoir Dereliction of Duty: Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security. “In my experience, nuclear launch codes are usually in the last place you saw them. We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.” These were, we realise in hindsight, perturbing hours for humanity, since it is only when the Pentagon and nuclear launch officers hear these codes that will they know for certain that the person on the line is really the president rather than, say, an Obama impersonator working for Kim Jong-un.

There may be some of you already suspecting that humanity’s best hopes for surviving a Trump presidency is to send his suits for dry cleaning before he gets to empty the pockets, or tuck the nuclear biscuit down the back of an Oval Office sofa while the president is distracted arranging his hair.

As for the nuclear football, it comes into active service when the president leaves the White House. It is the nickname for a large leather, aluminium-framed briefcase weighing 20kg which is hefted by a military aide who shadows the US commander in chief.

It is, as former Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs calls it, “the ultimate power accessory, a doomsday machine that could destroy the entire world”. The late Bill Gulley, a former director of the White House Military Office, described what’s inside the nuclear football in his 1980 memoir Breaking Cover. “There are four things in the football. The Black Book containing the retaliatory options, a book listing classified site locations, a manila folder with eight or 10 pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Broadcast System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The nuclear football in Red Square during Reagan’s visit. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

The nuclear football has an antenna protruding from it, likely indicating that inside there is a communication system with which the president can maintain contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Centre which monitors worldwide nuclear threats and can order an instant nuclear response. “The football,” says Dobbs, “also provides the commander-in-chief with a simplified menu of nuclear strike options – allowing him to decide, for example, whether to destroy all of America’s enemies in one fell swoop or to limit himself to obliterating only Moscow or Pyongyang or Beijing.” Or, presumably, Milton Keynes.

One of Ronald Reagan’s aides even carried the nuclear football across Red Square during a presidential visit to Moscow. In principle, Reagan could have ordered a first strike on the Soviet Union at that moment. In any case, Reagan’s Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, was also accompanied during the visit by a military aide holding a very similar bag, known in Russian as the chemodanchik, or “little briefcase.”

Over the years there have been several nuclear footballs, all manufactured for the White House by Zero Halliburton, the Utah firm that also supplied aluminium briefcases for movies like Men in Black II, Air Force One and perhaps less reassuringly, Dude, Where’s My Car? and Spy Kids. Today, visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington can see a retired nuclear football and, if so minded, salute its gallant contribution to global security.

The nuclear football came into active service after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when President Kennedy worried how the Pentagon and nuclear launch officers would be sure that it was really the president ordering a strike. Declassified documents reveal his concerns: “What would I say to the Joint War Room to launch an immediate nuclear strike?” Kennedy asked. “How would the person who received my instructions verify them?”

Now, long after the end of the cold war, the man bag still shadows the president on his or her travels. There are in fact three nuclear footballs – one kept near the president when they leave the White House, another for the vice-president and a third kept in storage in the White House. The nuclear football is not handcuffed to aides, as some have claimed, but has a leather cinch strap that can be looped around the wrist.

Why is the briefcase nicknamed the nuclear football? According to former US secretary of defence Robert McNamara, it was so-named because it was part of an early nuclear war plan code-named Operation Drop Kick.

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear black comedy Dr Strangelove, there is also an Operation Drop Kick. It denoted a nuclear exercise that goes wrong when the unhinged US general played by Sterling Hayden orders a first strike on the Soviet Union. All the president’s men strive to recall the bombers to prevent nuclear politics. As you know (spoiler alert!), they fail and the film concludes with Major TJ “King” Kong played by Slim Pickens, dropping from Russian skies astride a nuclear weapon.

In reality, happily, Operation Drop Kick hasn’t resulted in nuclear catastrophe. That said, there have been nuclear-football fumbles. Peter Metzger, a former marine who was one of five military aides charged with carrying the nuclear football for Reagan, recently recalled that once a colleague steered him into a different lift from the president and tricked him into thinking he had missed the motorcade. Metzger said his heart was racing “like a gerbil in a cage” until he realised his colleague was playing a practical joke.

Metzger said that carrying the nuclear football is a worrisome responsibility. “The result of a decision the president would make is so grotesquely horrible – it would change the face of the earth, it would change humanity, it would change mankind,” he said. “I guess when you’re on duty, you try not to think of the import of that. But you are fully prepared to do so if you have to.”

Robert Patterson, who carried the football for Clinton, said: “You’re always kind of on edge. I opened it up constantly just to refresh myself, to always be aware of what was in it, all the potential decisions the president could possibly make.”

Last year, one of the nuclear football’s trusty carriers, ex-marine John Kline, even used footage of the bag in a TV ad to help his campaign for re-election to Congress. “In this briefcase lies the fate of the world,” went the voiceover. “It contains top-secret codes to launch a nuclear strike. Two presidents – one from each party – trusted a young marine named John Kline to safeguard it.” It’s not clear how key that ad was to his successful campaign, but it probably didn’t hurt.

Aides who carry the nuclear football have extensive psychological evaluations to assess whether they’re up to the task. Metzger discloses that he underwent extensive vetting by the Defense Department, the secret service and the FBI before he was given the job. The incoming president, whether it is Trump or Clinton, will undergo no such checks as to their mental stability. There is, though, one consoling thought. Even if Trump did nuke Europe, he’d probably spare part of Aberdeenshire – he wouldn’t want to destroy his golf resort.

• This article was amended on 23 August 2016. An earlier version said that George C Scott played the unhinged US general who ordered an attack on the Soviet Union in the film Dr Strangelove. The general, Brig. General Jack D. Ripper, was played by Sterling Hayden.