When Bill Clinton 'lost vital White House nuclear codes' - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Former US President Bill Clinton had lost a card with a set of numbers for opening the briefcase containing the codes for a nuclear attack, a former top military officer has revealed. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Hugh Shelton revealed in his new memoir, "Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior", that the President lost the card, which is known as the biscuit, in 2000. "At one point during the Clinton administration the codes were actually missing for months. That's a big deal -- a gargantuan deal," the Telegraph quoted Shelton , as having written in his memoir. A similar claim was made by retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert Patterson, a former aide, in a book published seven years ago. Patterson, who was one of the men who carried the briefcase, had claimed that the President had misplaced the card in 1998. "He thought he just placed them upstairs," Patterson recalled. "We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn't recall when he had last seen them," Patterson said. Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States , serving from 1993 to 2001.