How many times did Bill Clinton lose nuclear codes?

Bill Clinton lost the codes needed to launch the United States' nuclear missiles on at least one occasion during his presidency, according to his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Hugh Shelton, who served in the White House from 1997 until 2001, writes about the incident in his new memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

"At one point during the Clinton administration," he recalls, "the codes were actually missing for months... That's a big deal - a gargantuan deal."

Shelton says Clinton lost his 'biscuit' - the term given to the card that bears the nuclear codes - in 2000. But according to ABC News, a similar story was told seven years ago in a book by Air Force Lt. Col Robert Patterson. He said that on the morning the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit the newspapers - that would be January 17, 1998 - he asked Clinton for his biscuit so that he could give him a new one bearing updated codes.

Patterson writes: "He thought he just placed them upstairs. 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."

Whether the two military men are telling the same story or remembering two separate instances is unclear.

But he probably isn't the first president to have misplaced his biscuit. There is an old, unconfirmed, tale of how Jimmy Carter sent his nuclear codes to the dry cleaners in a dirty suit. ·