Is this true? I hope not. Or if it was true I hope it isn't anymore. God help us.
'The whole bit about the ‘nuclear codes’ was a fiction in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. For one thing, many people below the President could order a nuclear attack. The movie Dr. Strangelove explains the official reasoning, which was that deterrence would not deter if you could kill the President and avoid an attack. So, the authority to launch got distributed down to the theater commanders. Who then used the same logic to distribute the authority down further. IIRC, Ellsberg interviewed an airbase commander a few miles from the DMZ in Korea who had the authority to launch a nuclear strike.
And, there was only one plan. … nuke every city in Russia and China. No matter what. And, everyone knew the codes because they never changed the combinations to the safes that held the codes and plans. So, after the first drill, everyone on the strategic bomber knew the combination to the safe and could read all the codes and the plan that was so secret that the Pentagon Generals refused to let President Eisenhower see it for security reasons.
So, at least in the past, there wasn’t really any ‘nuclear codes’ and the whole bit of someone following the President around with ‘nuclear football’ was a fiction. Some base commander named Col Jack Ripper could indeed have launched a nuclear war anytime they wanted to.'