Nuclear football

Among the most alarming episodes during Donald J. Trump’s tumultuous final weeks in the White House was an announcement by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, on 10 January:  ‘This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [General] Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.’ Almost half a century earlier, there had been a similar – though secret – alarm about another unstable president with his finger on the nuclear button.  At the height of the Watergate Crisis in 1974, when president Richard Nixon,