Name: How a U.S. Nuclear Strike Actually Works
Uploaded: 2018-03-02T10:44:49.000Z
Duration: 2 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What if the President of the United States decides to launch a nuclear strike?

President Trump started 2018 with a tweet chiding North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un that “he

And it's “bigger and more powerful” than Kim's

But launching a missile involves much more than pushing a button.

Here's what would actually need to happen.

The president must first discuss the plan with a group of military and civilian advisers.

That group includes the Pentagon's deputy director of operations, and the head of U.S.

Strategic Command- anyone else in the group is at the President's discretion.

The call either takes place in the White House Situation Room or the president can be patched

Some of the advisers may try to change the president's mind or resign in protest, but

ultimately, the Pentagon must do whatever the commander-in-chief orders.

That meeting with advisors can be as short as 30 seconds.

Next the president gives the order to launch.

But before the Pentagon can prepare the launch order, it must first verify that the

person ordering the strike is indeed the president.

An officer in the Pentagon's war room reads what's known as a “challenge code”.

The president retrieves the “biscuit,” a laminated card the president or a military

aide carries at all times, and finds the matching response to the challenge code:

Once the codes match, the launch order goes out.

The war room prepares a message containing the war plan, time of launch, authentication

codes and the codes needed to unlock the missiles before firing them.

That message is only about 150 characters long

It's encoded, encrypted and broadcast to launch crews.at this point only about 2-to-3

minutes may have passed since the initial conference call.

Within seconds, a submarine and five ICBM crews in various underground bunkers receive

They open safes and compare their Sealed Authentication System codes (SAS) to those sent by the war

This will confirm that the order is authentic.

If the codes match, the crews enter the war plan number into their launch computers.

They type additional code to unlock the missiles, and at the designated time of launch, the

five crews simultaneously turn a launch key retrieved from their safe…

It only takes two crews to launch, so three can refuse to do any of the prior steps and

For missiles are launched from a submarine, there is no second key - the crew has full

It's been about AS LITTLE AS 5 minutes from the time the president decided to launch a

nuclear missle to the time the missle or missile(s) blast out of their silos.

It will take submarine missiles an additional 15 minutes until they shoot out of their tubes.

Once it fires, a missile and its warhead cannot be called back.

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How a U.S. Nuclear Strike Actually Works

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