is there really a big red button for nukes

By 1995, though, Yeltsin’s popularity in the West was in decline there was tension over plans to expand NATO and Russia was bogged down in a war in Chechnya. The next day, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned on December 25, 1991, and had handed over the football and the launch codes to Yeltsin. The Cold War had been over for four years. Yeltsin had less than six minutes to make a decision. Kolesnikov was put on a hot line with Yeltsin, whose prerogative it was to launch a nuclear response. The launch site was also in the most likely corridor for an attack on Moscow by American submarines. Radar showed that stages of the rocket were falling away as it ascended, which suggested that it was an intermediate-range missile similar to the Pershing II, the missile deployed by NATO across Western Europe.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring the flight of the missile. Yeltsin had forty-seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to go. Russian nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers were on full alert.

This was the Russian “nuclear football.” By pressing the buttons, Yeltsin could launch an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. There have been hundreds of accidents involving nuclear weapons since 1945.

Is there really a big red button for nukes