DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A former CIA director and British prime minister are not mincing words about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's claim that he doesn't need daily intelligence briefings. 
 
 Former U.S. spymaster Leon Panetta said on Wednesday at the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai that he has "never seen a president who has said, 'I don't want that stuff'." 
 
 He says: "Never seen it." 
 
 Former British Prime Minister David Cameron then jumped in and said "it won't last." 
 
 Panetta added: "It can't last." 
 
 Trump said on "Fox News Sunday" that he's not interested in daily intelligence briefings unless developments change enough to merit his attention. 
 
 Trump also said: "I'm, like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years." ||||| Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images Trump’s nuclear wake-up call ‘It’s a sobering moment,’ Bush’s chief of staff says about the classified nuclear briefing before a president’s swearing in. 
 
 By the time he is sworn in tomorrow, Donald Trump will have undergone a haunting rite of passage: the classified briefing given to every incoming president that explains how he can order a nuclear attack. 
 
 While neither U.S. nor Trump officials would confirm the exact time or location of Trump’s briefing, several past presidents have been briefed on the nuclear codes at the historic Blair House, on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, hours before their inauguration. 
 
 “It’s a sobering moment. It defines the ultimate obligation that you might have,” said Andrew Card, who served as chief of staff to George W. Bush and was with Bush just before and after his first nuclear briefing in January 2001. 
 
 It is also likely a sobering for millions of the Americans who heard a series of Trump rivals warn last year that the New York mogul must never gain access to America’s massive nuclear arsenal. 
 
 “How can you trust him with the nuclear codes?” Obama said at one October rally. “You can’t do it.” 
 
 But America will do it on Friday. From the moment Donald Trump is inaugurated, he will be trailed everywhere he goes by a military aide carrying a 45-pound black satchel colloquially known as the nuclear “football.” Inside will be the codes, war plans and communication tools needed to start a nuclear war. 
 
 “Every step needed to assure a peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next is taking place” — Sean Spicer, Trump spokesman 
 
 By then, national security officials will have instructed Trump on the chilling steps he would have to take to order a nuclear launch that could, in theory, kill hundreds of millions of people. 
 
 Little is known about the briefing itself, which an Obama White House spokesman declined to discuss. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer would say only that “every step needed to assure a peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next is taking place.” 
 
 But nuclear experts and former presidential aides offered some detail and historical context for what they call a harrowing glimpse at a nightmare scenario. 
 
 Confronting the reality of nuclear war has left past presidents deeply moved, even shaken. In his 1999 memoir, Bill Clinton’s former spokesman George Stephanopoulos described seeing Clinton emerge from his nuclear briefing, held at 7 a.m. on the morning of his inauguration. 
 
 “The man who would soon command the most powerful military force in the world emerged… silent and more somber than I’d ever seen him,” Stephanopoulos wrote. 
 
 Clinton wasn’t the only one moved. Stephanopoulos recalled that George H.W. Bush’s outgoing national security adviser, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, “slipped out of Blair House and into the street with tears reddening the rims of his eyes.” 
 
 Trump himself has spoken about the horror of nuclear weapons. “I’d be the last one to use the nuclear weapons, because that’s sort of like the end of the ballgame,” he said at a March 2016 MSNBC town hall. 
 
 But at the same event, Trump refused to rule out the use of nuclear arms, and cited the Islamic State as a possible target if “somebody hits us.” 
 
 Sources familiar with the shadowy world of the U.S. nuclear establishment said that Trump would customarily be briefed by the outgoing national security advisor, Susan Rice, along with the White House military aide responsible for the so-called nuclear football. Trump would likely be joined by his incoming national security advisor, Michael Flynn. 
 
 If the recent past is a guide, Trump’s briefing will occur at Blair House on Friday morning, where Trump plans to spend Thursday night. Like Clinton, Obama took his nuclear briefing on the morning of his 2009 inauguration, just before heading to an 8:30 a.m. church service. 
 
 The briefing itself does not involve grand nuclear strategy, nuclear experts and current and former U.S officials said. Presidents attend separate sessions in which military officials outline scenarios from all-out attack on Russia to war with China to limited strikes against rogue nations like North Korea. 
 
 Instead, Trump’s Friday briefing is meant to ensure that he understands how to quickly order a nuclear attack in the event of an emergency. 
 
 “The briefer is very, very military. It’s a military briefing,” Card said. “It’s not a briefing of the conscience. It’s by-the-book, it’s rote.” 
 
 “It’s kind of like how to use your remote control for the TV,” Card added. 
 
 The session guides a president in the use of the famous nuclear codes — which are not transmitted to missile silos, bombers and submarines but used, like a password, to verify the president’s identity when he sends a launch order to the Pentagon. 
 
 An October letter signed by 10 former nuclear launch officers warned that the pressures of nuclear command on a president “are staggering and require enormous composure, judgment, restraint and diplomatic skill.” 
 
 Timothy McBride, a former military aide in George H.W. Bush’s White House, said Scowcroft informed Clinton in their January 1993 briefing that he would be pulled aside in the U.S. Capitol building just after his swearing-in and presented with the nuclear codes. 
 
 Trump critics note with alarm that an American president does not need the approval of Congress, his cabinet or any other entity to order the use of nuclear weapons — although in theory, his defense secretary could refuse to transmit a launch order down the military chain of command. 
 
 A president’s largely unchecked power to order a nuclear attack was the subject of campaign ads in support of Hillary Clinton last fall. In one, Bruce Blair, a former nuclear missile launch officer turned disarmament advocate, declared: “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone.” 
 
 Since the end of the Cold War, the prospect of a president being forced to respond within minutes to a massive Russian attack — the main reason for a system that allows a president to order an attack quickly and unilaterally — has been greatly reduced. 
 
 But the Cold War system endures, in part because Russia maintains about 1,800 active nuclear warheads capable of hitting the U.S. (The U.S. keeps active about 1,400 warheads.) 
 
 And in recent months, many experts have warned that the prospect of a nuclear conflict with an increasingly belligerent Russia has grown — although Trump says he wants warmer relations with Russia and said in an interview over the weekend that “nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially.” 
 
 It is unclear whether such talk will assuage critics who warned during the campaign that Trump could not be trusted with the presidency’s most awesome power. 
 
 An October letter signed by 10 former nuclear launch officers, including Blair, warned that the pressures of nuclear command on a president “are staggering and require enormous composure, judgment, restraint and diplomatic skill.” 
 
 “Donald Trump does not have these leadership qualities. On the contrary, he has shown himself time and again to be easily baited and quick to lash out, dismissive of expert consultation and ill-informed of even basic military and international affairs — including, most especially, nuclear weapons,” the letter said. 
 
 But some believe that first-hand experience with the theoretical means of destroying much of the world could have a profound effect on Trump. 
 
 “You cannot take over such an authority without getting a sense of such an unbelievable authority,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “Not just to the nation, but to the planet.”
– As of Tuesday, Donald Trump has had the chance to attend 36 daily presidential national security briefings, per Michael Moore's tally. As of a week ago, the president-elect said he had attended, at most, three. Moore joins the chorus of those who see this as a deal-breaker, and he explains why in a Facebook post titled, "Donald Trump Is Gonna Get Us Killed." Moore provides a history lesson: While vacationing in Texas, George W. Bush was handed the daily briefing on August 6, 2001. Writes Moore: "He glanced at it, set it aside and then went fishing for the rest of the day." The briefing's headline: "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE INSIDE US." Inside it referenced the use of planes. Bush ended his vacation four weeks later, writes Moore. "In the fifth week, bin Laden attacked the US with planes." "It's one thing to have a president who was asleep at the wheel," he continues. "But, my friends, it's a whole other thing to now have a president-elect who REFUSES TO EVEN GET BEHIND THE WHEEL!" In Moore's view, Trump's "utter neglect of duty" will result in the loss of American lives. Moore isn't the only one commenting on the topic. The AP reports that at the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai on Wednesday, ex-CIA director Leon Panetta said he has "never seen a president who has said, 'I don't want that stuff'. Never seen it." A former world leader agreed: "It won't last," responded David Cameron. "It can't last," said Panetta. As for Moore, he last week confirmed in an email to the Hollywood Reporter that he planned to "non-violently disrupt" Trump's DC inauguration. (Trump had something to say about the briefings in 2014.)