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During the third and final presidential debate on 19 October 2016, social media users began tweeting up a storm claiming Hillary Clinton leaked classified information by revealing details about the United States' nuclear response protocols, specifically that the timeframe between a presidential order and a launch of nuclear weapons was four minutes: The exchange in question occurred during a debate over diplomatic relations with Russia and allegations that the Russian government had attempted to interfere in the 2016 election. Moderator Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump whether he condemn[ed] any interference by Russia in the American election, to which Trump answered in the affirmative. The discussion then turned to nuclear weapons (at the 33-minute mark in the clip below), a subject which Hillary Clinton contended showed her opponent to be unsuitable for the presidency: At 8:35 PM on 19 October 2016, Clinton published a tweet on the same subject, stating that a president's decision to use nuclear weapons can take as little as four minutes (from order to launch) suggesting that the window she referenced was somewhat fluid: Most of the people tweeting that Clinton had leaked classified information by mentioning this window cited no specific information substantiating that to be true (or explaining how they themselves could know and openly discuss information that was supposedly classified). If the information were indeed classified, confirming it with any government agency would prove difficult, for obvious reasons. An alternative method of determining whether Clinton inadvertently disclosed classified information about nuclear protocols would be to verify if that information was already publicly known and open discussed. Indeed, on 5 August 2016 Foreign Policy magazine published an article about that very subject with a subhead that openly proclaimed it: The piece had been inspired by (an unsubstantiated) rumor spread by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough suggesting that Donald Trump appeared interested in having the United States use nuclear weapons. The article's author cited a book Walter Slocombe wrote nearly 30 years ago as well as a contemporaneous nuclear timeline examining whether nuclear launch under attack was feasible. Based on discussion that occurred during the MSNBC segment about the steps leading up to the use of nukes, the article focused on the timeline of nuclear events based on an anecdote from 1979: (At this point the substance of the claim diverges slightly, from holding that it takes four minutes to launch nuclear weapons once the President has given the order to do so, to holding that the President has four minutes to decide whether to launch nuclear weapons once he's been informed that a nuclear attack on the U.S. is imminent.) Internet chatter from 2015 also described four minutes as an old Cold War rule of thumb for the timeframe between first detection of incoming nuclear missiles and those missiles' hitting their targets. Most articles on the subject published prior to the debate referenced (as Clinton's tweet appeared to do) a windows of roughly between four to 12 minutes in which a sitting President must decide to launch a nuclear attack: Among the people weighing in after the debate were who were able to assess the rumor and rate it was nuclear security expert Joe Cirincione, who issued two tweets about the controversy — one explicitly stating that Clinton did not disclose classified information and another reiterating that the information was already widely known and often cited:
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