Nuclear security

Bill Clinton-Boris Yeltsin Discussions of the Nuclear Football

The “Football,” the nominally secret command-and-control system used to assure presidential control of nuclear use decisions, was the unusual subject of high-level discussion between President William J. Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin during meetings in 1994 and 1997.  According to recently declassified memoranda of conversation (memcons) published for the first time by the National Security Archive, Yeltsin suggested getting “rid” of the Football, so that military aides no longer had to “drag” it around.  He saw the U.S. Football and the Russian equivalent (“chemodanchik”) as obsolete because of the advanced communications technologies that presidents had at their disposal.

Clinton politely demurred because he saw the Football as an important symbol of civilian control of nuclear weapons.  When Yeltsin brought up his proposal at a second meeting in 1997, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot commented that it was better for presidents “to have these devices with you at all times rather than to have the function assigned to a computer somewhere or to anyone else.”