New book reveals Bill Clinton lost secret nuclear launch codes for MONTHS | Daily Mail Online

By David Gardner for MailOnlineUpdated: 15:51 EST, 21 October 2010

As President of the United States, you can lose the occasional round of golf. You can lose your temper. You can even lose the plot sometimes.

But you can never lose ‘The Biscuit’.

It is the nickname given to the plastic card the president carries with him at all times with the codes necessary to launch a nuclear strike.

Codes... what codes? The then US president Bill Clinton is said to have lost the card on which codes needed to launch a nuclear attack are printed

And, according to a new memoir by a former Pentagon general, Bill Clinton not only misplaced the nuclear key card, it was missing for several months.

Mr Clinton, who was president between 1993 and 2001, had his aides turn the White House upside down, but it is unclear whether the codes were ever found. 

The astounding gaffe was revealed by General Hugh Shelton, who served under Mr Clinton as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his book, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

‘At one point during the Clinton administration the codes were actually missing for months,’ he writes. ‘That’s a big deal – a gargantuan deal.’

President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky at the White House: The President realised he'd lost the codes the day after the Monica Lewinsky scandal first hit the headlines

The Biscuit carries the unique codes that identify the president as the only person allowed to authorise a nuclear attack. It also carries the numbers required to unlock a black briefcase known as ‘The Football’, which is carried by a military officer who is always at the commander-in-chief’s side.

Inside the case is another set of codes, on a mobile computer terminal, which the president would need to launch nuclear weapons.

The case also reportedly contains ‘The Black Book’, which lists retaliatory options should the U.S. come under nuclear attack and secret locations where the president could hide.

Misplaced: Mr Clinton lost the 'biscuit' containing the codes and aides searched for it after he was hand it over for a replacement

Before an order to launch a nuclear attack can be processed by the military, the President must be positively identified using the special code issued on the plastic card

Without The Biscuit, the most powerful man on the planet was powerless. The blunder was confirmed by another senior former military officer, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert Patterson, one of those charged with carrying around The Football.

He said the gaffe became evident the morning the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998 – Mr Clinton was alleged to have had an affair with the White House intern.

Lt Col Patterson said he made a routine request of the president to present him with the card so he could update it. ‘He thought he just placed them upstairs,’ he said.

‘We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he had misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.’

While he said the card went missing in 1998, Gen Shelton claimed it happened in 2000.

But Mr Clinton may not have been the first president to lose the codes.

Although the story has never been officially confirmed, Jimmy Carter supposedly managed to leave them in a suit sent to the dry cleaners.