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For nearly 20 years the nuclear launch code at all US Minuteman Silos was 00000000

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Don't just take my word for it.

Mind blowing.

In fact, it was noted that a full 20 years after JFK had order PALs be fitted to every nuclear device, half of the missiles in Europe were still protected by simple mechanical locks. Most that did have the new system in place weren’t even activated until 1977.

Those in the U.S. that had been fitted with the devices, such as ones in the Minuteman Silos, were installed under the close scrutiny of Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defence. However, The Strategic Air Command greatly resented McNamara’s presence and almost as soon as he left, the code to launch the missile’s, all 50 of them, was set to 00000000.
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Holiest of holy shit.
 
sinxtanx said:
*falls asleep on the 0 key*
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PYLbGaF.gif
 
Just imagine a Russian spy risking his life.
Then finding out the code. And then asking himself, if he should report that back. His superiors would have probably not believed him.
 
Ya'll remember the dude who went on a rampage in a tank over in California back in the 90s? The access code was like "1234".

Edit: my bad remembering it wrong. It was just very badly secured.
 
I'm not sure why people think you could just waltz into a nuclear facility and punch the code into the nearest keyboard and launch a global nuclear holocaust. If you are in a position to enter those codes, the fact they are just a bunch of zeros isn't going to mean shit.
 
This is fairly old, and I'd heard that this was a misunderstanding, and the original situation is that the *lock* for the systems was set to 00000000 by default - on the understanding that getting *from* that to the actual right unlock code is more intuitive than if the dials were set to an arbitrary value.

Edit: Here's a Snopes thread from 2004 on the subject. The responder who says what I said above (Warlok) at least sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but I've no idea what his background is.
 
According to a guy in the comments of that article, the "launch codes" were never unsecure.

What apparently happened was that among the usual safeguards people generally think about (orders from the president, launch codes, simultaneous key turnings), there was also a switch you had to flip to "arm" the missile. JFK's Secretary of Defense thought that this level of security wasn't enough, so he had the simple "arm" switches removed and replaced with 8-digit codes. And the launch staff was required to maintain those codes.

The military thought that this was an unnecessary complication, and that it would just screw up legitimate launch attempts, because "Oh shit, I forgot the arm code. Hey, does anyone remember the arm code?" So as soon as the Secretary stopped looking, the military just changed the password to zero.

Also, this new lock wasn't even installed on every system.

The guy in the comments says that the Air Force has a similar lock, and they changed the password to 01234567. And that these passwords are listed in unclassified operations manuals.
 
I thought this was common knowledge. It's not like you could ssh into the US nuclear arsenal and do a crypto attack. So while this may seem shocking, it doesn't mean that the arsenal was implicitly insecure. PAL type safeties probably aren't on a number of nations warheads, but they secure them through other means. Tbh they only provide security in very limited circumstances.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
I thought this was common knowledge. It's not like you could ssh into the US nuclear arsenal and do a crypto attack. So while this may seem shocking, it doesn't mean that the arsenal was implicitly insecure. PAL type safeties probably aren't on a number of nations warheads, but they secure them through other means. Tbh they only provide security in very limited circumstances.
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Yeah, I thought it was general knowledge too. This "shocking" bit of information has popped up every few years on the web since as long as I can remember. Maybe it's a generational thing.

It should also be mentioned that this wasn't incompetence or ignorance, it was by design. Says it straight on the wiki for PAL's:

For the Minuteman ICBM force, the US Air Force's Strategic Air Command worried that in times of need the codes would not be available, so they quietly decided to set them to 00000000. The missile launch checklists included an item confirming this combination until 1977.[7]
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EDIT: Silly me, didn't check the link at Wiki - it's also from the Blair article. So there's a possibility what mclem wrote is correct and that you just started with 000000000000.
 
Speaking of the Air Force Strategic Command, the cold war and nuclear missiles, this might be topical: the reason NORAD tracks santa:

Ever since the mid-1950s, generations of children in North America (and, since the advent of the Internet, children from all over the world) have eagerly turned to an annual service provided by the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to help them track the progress of Santa Claus every Christmas Eve as he departs the North Pole and traverses the globe in his reindeer-driven sleigh, delivering presents to good little boys and girls around the world.

NORAD's engaging well over a thousand people to provide a yearly Santa-tracking program seems to many like a rather whimsical venture for a staid defense-based agency to be engaging in. And, in fact, NORAD didn't set out to be in the business of providing real-time Santa updates every Christmas Eve: that service came about strictly by accident, the result of a wrong number published in a local department store newspaper advertisement.
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Long story made short: the number the ad posted was to the secret "Oh my God the Russians are coming!!!" hotline. And thus a tradition was born.
 
So, maybe we should make sure there's some more tech savvy people in charge of these things? That's scary.
 
Alucrid said:
they don't like their authority being usurped
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McNamara was also not considered to be one of "them". He wasn't a military man, he was a Harvard assistant professor teaching accounting in business school who ended up in the Air Force teaching higher officers statistical methods during WW2. He didn't pay much heed to the military chain of command - he is one of the primary reasons the M16 ever became a service rifle, the brass at the time hated it for being too unconventional.
 
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